Caesar’s citizenship grants created Rome’s permanent imperial intellectual class.

Evidence

The change in the condition of the social position of the intellectuals in Rome between Republican and Imperial times (a change from an aristocratic-corporate to a democratic-bureaucratic regime) is due to Caesar, who granted citizenship to doctors and to masters of liberal arts so that they would be more willing to live in Rome and so that others should be persuaded to come there. … Caesar therefore proposed: 1. to establish in Rome those intellectuals who were already there, thus creating a permanent category of intellectuals, since without their permanent residence there no cultural organisation could be created; and 2. to attract to Rome the best intellectuals from all over the Roman Empire, thus promoting centralisation on a massive scale. In this way there came into being the category of “imperial” intellectuals in Rome which was to be continued by the Catholic clergy and to leave so many traces in the history of Italian intellectuals, such as their characteristic “cosmopolitanism”, up to the eighteenth century. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 300

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the Foundations toolkit concept of how state sponsorship manufactures intellectual classes — carried forward to colonial knowledge regimes in Islamophobia readings.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does Caesar’s deliberate elite creation compare to later colonial projects that manufactured native clerical/intellectual classes?