Romans learned religion, for the most part, through participation, but tradition and parents were also an influence. Personal religious affiliations were fluid, often included multiple gods, and one's religious feelings were not considered binding on one's communities. Such affiliations did not represent 'membership' in a religion in the modern sense. Membership was reserved for the city in the form of citizenship. Citizenship granted legal and political identity, but not a cultural and social identity. For that, Rome created a larger sense of ethnic community by defining, in the last two centuries BCE, what it meant to be "Roman". By the middle of the third century of the common era, Orlin says that Rome possessed "the myths of shared descent, a name, a history, a territory and a sense of solidarity" adding that "Roman religion needs to be considered as a primary element of that" whole process. Orlin asserts that it is this sense of Roman identity, and the central place of Roman religion, that allowed Rome to solidify as a state and to build an empire.