Roman Republic and the Delian League: a comparison

The Delian league is often considered an Athenian empire because of the level of control Athens had over its allies. Athens' growing power over Greek affairs triggered the Peloponnesian War.

The contemporary Roman Republic was not a single state either, but a league of Italians under the hegemony of Rome. Roman citizenship was extended to all eventually (over the opposition of conservatives), and Rome was no longer a city state.

Had the League not been dismantled by Sparta and its allies, would Athens have become the Greek Rome as Athenian citizenship became desirable throughout Greece?

Can the example of the Delian League offer a glimpse into what might have happened on the Italian peninsula had Rome been defeated by Carthage? Would Carthage be able to prop up Italian statelets to counterbalance Rome?
 
The Delian league is often considered an Athenian empire because of the level of control Athens had over its allies. Athens' growing power over Greek affairs triggered the Peloponnesian War.

The contemporary Roman Republic was not a single state either, but a league of Italians under the hegemony of Rome. Roman citizenship was extended to all eventually (over the opposition of conservatives), and Rome was no longer a city state.

Had the League not been dismantled by Sparta and its allies, would Athens have become the Greek Rome as Athenian citizenship became desirable throughout Greece?

Can the example of the Delian League offer a glimpse into what might have happened on the Italian peninsula had Rome been defeated by Carthage? Would Carthage be able to prop up Italian statelets to counterbalance Rome?

The Roman Republic was technically analog to the Athenian polis, not to the Delian League. Roman hegemony in Italy after the Latin Wars was enforced through single treaties between individual polities (or groups of these) and the Roman republic. There was no overarching political framework comparable to the Delian League.
The critical difference however was citizenship. Athenian, and generally Hellenic, citizenship was very emphatically tied to ancestry. You did not, except in rather exceptional cases, become Athenian. Athenians felt they were literally autocthonous: born out of the soil of Attica itself. So they almost never seriously considered extending citizenship, even in a diminished form, to other Greeks (there is an exception: if memory serves, it was considered for Samos in 411 BC; the context being a particularly troubled moment during the war with Sparta combined with an internal situation bordering on civil war).
Rome, however, began quite early to incorporate fully other communities and more or less never stopped to see that as feasible in principle, notionally into the Middle Ages. The feature was tied, possibly pretty early on, into the foundational myths of the state, that insisted on the role of waves of refugees and different ethnic groups intermingling into new civic identities - quite unlike most of continental Greece.
This was arguably the most critical difference between Greek and Italic notions of civic life in general, but Rome was probably extreme even by Italic standards - and that probably was among the critical factors for its way to dominance.
 
I doubt, the roman strategy about citizenship would work in a hellenic league. Actually it did not work that good in the eastern part of the roman empire. The greeks were very proud on their specific local citizenship. Most cities were convinced, that they had the best one. Of course the nobility of the cities often had both citizenships by practical reasons. Roman citizenship was granted almost automatically to all local magistrates.

Roman citizenship on a broad scale was less accepted in the eastern provinces than in the western provinces. When Caracalla granted citizenship to all inhabitants of the empire, the most western provinces already had it. Hispania got it by Vespasianus, Africa by Severus and Gallia even earlier. The Constitutio Antoniana changed not that much in the West, but in the hellenic East. The East never asked for it.
 
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