A civitas foederata, meaning "allied state/community", was the most elevated type of autonomous cities and local communities under Roman rule.
Each Roman province comprised a number of communities of different status. Alongside Roman colonies or municipia , whose residents held the Roman citizenship or Latin citizenship, a province was largely formed by self-governing communities of natives ( peregrini ), which were distinguished according to the level of autonomy they had: the lowest were the civitates stipendariae ("tributary states"), followed by the civitates liberae ("free states"), which had been granted specific privileges. [1] [2]
Unlike the latter, the civitates foederatae were individually bound to Rome by formal treaty ( foedus ). Although they remained formally independent, the civitates foederatae in effect surrendered their foreign relation to Rome, to which they were bound by perpetual alliance. [3] Nevertheless, the citizens of these cities enjoyed certain rights under Roman law, like the commercium and the conubium . [4] In the Greek East, many of the Greek city-states ( poleis ) were formally liberated and granted some form of formal guarantee of their autonomy. As they had a long history and tradition of their own, most of these communities were content with this status, unlike in the Latin West, where, with their progressive Romanization, many communities sought a gradual advancement to the status of a municipium or even a colonia. [1]
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