OK, so to answer this question we need three things. First, an understanding of the modern historiography / academic debate about pre-modern nationalism; second, a sense of the genealogy of 'nation' as a historical term/concept; third, an understanding of the intellectual/cultural history of Roman conceptions of political and social identification. I am not a classicist, so my thoughts on the third point are entirely based on my reading of some of the historiography, but since my area of professional expertise is early modern conceptions of nationality, the first two are well within my wheelhouse.

1: The modern historiography

In the late 90s and early 2000s, there were some quite vituperative academic arguments about whether ‘nationalism’ is an exclusively modern phenomenon.

In the left corner were political scientists and some political science-influenced historians such as Krishan Kumar and John Breuilly, who followed in the tradition of Eric Hobsbawm, Ernst Gellner and others in insisting that nationalism was exclusively a modern phenomenon – also known as the ‘modernist’ position. Without going too deeply into their specific claims, these scholars had a few things in common: they were generally historians of post-French revolution subjects, and had little expertise on earlier history; they were frequently influenced by Marxist ways of thinking about historical periodisation; they generally observed myth-making about the past as a key feature of modern nationalisms; and they were generally hostile to these modern nationalisms.

In the right corner were a rag-tag mix of literary and theological scholars, medieval historians, and renegade political scientists, such as Susan Reynolds, Adrian Hastings, and Liah Greenfield, who noted that their research indicated very strong senses of ‘national identity’ in their pre-modern subjects, and bristled at the arbitrary relegation of their historical subjects as ‘proto-nationalism’ by people who had no significant expertise in these earlier periods. The understandings of nationalism that these scholars had varied – some saw nationalism as being ‘constructed’ by medieval or even ancient polities before the French revolution, while others saw it as an endemic or even ‘primordial’ feature of human communities.

Both groups, frankly, had some serious problems and some legitimate grievances, and they spent substantial time arguing past each other. Modernists accused ‘pre-modernists’ of being apologists for the myth-making of modern nations, and using ‘national identity’ as an imprecise and unhelpful category (which it is – see Fred Cooper and Rogers Brubaker’s brilliant takedown of identity as a category of analysis). Pre-modernists correctly accused modernists of ultracrepidarianism – making claims beyond their expertise – and of relying on definitional circularity to win the argument (see, for example, Hobwbawm’s statement that ‘the basic characteristic of the modern nation, and everything connected with it, is its modernity,’ which was dismissed as a ‘thudding tautology’). Nobody could agree on a definition of Nationalism, and nobody could agree on what constituted an example of the fulfilment of that definition.

So, how do we get out of this mess? One answer is to approach the problem using a historicist, intellectual history-based approach. What did conceptions of the ‘nation’ look like in different times and places, and how were they used in those contexts? We can then see how conceptions of ‘nation’ have been constructed, and why they came to mean so much to people that a phenomenon called ‘nationalism’ could be defined with the nation as a referent. This approach relies on some careful distinctions in our terminology, especially between what anthropologists call ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ concepts: ‘emic’ concepts are ones which exist in the period we are studying; ‘etic’ ones are those ideas which scholars construct themselves, and apply to the past, in order to make sense of patterns in it.

So the question becomes, how have people in the past conceptualised ‘nations?’ How has that term acquired meaning and power for people, and how have people used it as a rhetorical or political tool?

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