The arts by which isolation was produced were put in practice at the settlement of Latium fifty years before. The same plan was pursued with the different Italian nations. Those which submitted with a good grace were treated leniently. Those which resisted stubbornly were weakened by the confiscation of their lands and by the settlement of colonies in their principal towns. The Frentanians are the best examples of the milder treatment; the Samnites afford the most notable instance of the more harsh.
The work of isolation was promoted partly by the long and narrow shape of Italy and the mountain range by which it is traversed, which make a central government difficult, and still break it up into many states, but partly also by a sentiment common to most of the Italian nations, as well as to those of Greece. They regarded a man, not as one of a nation, but as the member of a civic community. Every one regarded his first duties as owed to his own city, and not to his nation. Their city was their country. They addressed one another not as fellow-countrymen, but as fellow-citizens. Rome herself was the noblest specimen of this form of society. And the settlement which she adopted throughout Italy took advantage of this prevailing rule, and perpetuated it.
Not only were the Italians split up into civic communities, but these communities were themselves placed in very different conditions. The division of the Italian communities, as established by the Roman government, was threefold—prefectures, municipal towns, and colonies.
The prefectures did not enjoy the right of self-government, but were under the rule of prefects or Roman governors, annually appointed; and the inhabitants of the prefecture were registered by the Roman censor, so as to be liable to all the burdens of Roman citizens, without enjoying any of their privileges. This condition was called the Cærite franchise, because the town of Cære was the first community placed in this dependent position. Amid the terror of the Gallic invasion, Cære had afforded a place of refuge to the sacred things, to the women and children of the Romans, and had been rewarded by a treaty of equal alliance. But at a later period she joined other Etruscan communities in war against Rome, and for this reason she was reduced to the condition of a prefecture. Capua afterwards became a notable instance of a similar change. After the Samnite Wars she enjoyed a state of perfect equality in respect to Rome. The troops which she supplied in virtue of the alliance between her and Rome formed a separate legion, and were commanded by her own officers, as in the case of Decius Jubellius. But in the Hannibalic War she joined Hannibal; and to punish her she was degraded to the condition of a prefecture.
At the period of which we write, the municipal towns were communities bound to Rome by treaties of alliance, framed on a general principle with respect to burdens and privileges. Their burdens consisted in furnishing certain contingents of troops, which they were obliged to provide with pay and equipments while on service. Their privileges consisted in freedom from all other taxes, and in possessing the right of self-government. This condition was secured by a treaty of alliance, which, nominally at least, placed the municipal community on a footing of equality with Rome; though sometimes this treaty was imposed by Rome without consulting the will of the other community.[45] Thus there was, no doubt, a considerable diversity of condition among the municipia. Some regarded their alliance as a boon, others looked upon it as a mark of subjection. In the former condition were Cære and Capua before they were made prefectures; in the latter condition was Volsinii and the Etruscan cities. The municipal towns enjoyed the civil or private rights of Roman citizens; but none, without special grant, had any power of obtaining the political or public rights. In some cases even the private rights were withheld, as from the greater part of the Latin communities after the war of 338 B.C., when the citizens of each community were for a time forbidden to form contracts of marriage or commerce with Roman citizens or with their neighbours. They stood to Rome and to the rest of Italy much in the same condition as the plebeians to the patricians before the Canuleian law. But these prohibitions were gradually and silently removed. Municipal towns were often rewarded by a gift of the Roman franchise, more or less completely, while those which offended were depressed to the condition of prefectures. At length, by the Julian and other laws (B.C. 90), all the municipal towns of Italy, as well as the colonies, received the full Roman franchise; and hence arose the common conception of a municipal town—that is, a community of which the citizens are members of the whole nation, all possessing the same rights, and subject to the same burdens, but retaining the administration of law and government in all local matters which concern not the nation at large.
Colonies; Free and Confederate States
It is in the colonial towns that we must look for the chief instruments of Roman supremacy in Italy. Directly dependent upon Rome for existence, they served more than anything to promote that division of interests which rendered it so difficult for any part of Italy to combine against Rome.
When we speak or think of Roman colonies, we must dismiss all those conceptions of colonisation which are familiar to our minds from the practice pursued in the familiar cases of the maritime states of modern Europe.[46] Roman colonies were not planted in new countries by adventurers who found their old homes too narrow for their wants or their ambition. When the Romans planted a colony (at the time we speak of and for more than a century later), it was always within the limits of the Italian peninsula, and within the walls of ancient cities whose obstinate resistance made it imprudent to restore them to independence, and whose reduced condition rendered it possible to place them in the condition of subjects. But these colonies were not all of the same character. They must be distinguished into two classes: the colonies of Roman citizens, and the Latin colonies.
The colonies of Roman citizens consisted usually of three hundred men of approved military experience, who went forth with their families to occupy conquered cities of no great magnitude, but which were important as military positions, being usually on the seacoast. These three hundred families formed a sort of patrician caste, while the old inhabitants sank into the condition formerly occupied by the plebeians at Rome. The heads of these families retained all their rights as Roman citizens, and might repair to Rome to vote in the popular assemblies. When in early Roman history we hear of the revolt of a colony, the meaning seems to be that the natives rose against the colonists and expelled them. Hence it is that we hear of colonists being sent more than once to the same place, as to Antium.
