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It is probable that its germs may be traced to exceptional regulations for the great burgess-colonies, which were founded at the end of the sixth century; at least several, in themselves indifferent, formal differences between burgess-colonies and burgess municipia- tend to show that the new burgess-colony, which at that time practically took the place of the Latin, had originally a better position in state-law than the far older burgess- -municipium-, and the advantage doubtless can only have consisted in a municipal constitution approximating to the Latin, such as afterwards belonged to all burgess-colonies and burgess municipia-. The new organization is first distinctly demonstrable for the revolutionary colony of Capua; and it admits of no doubt that it was first fully applied, when all the hitherto sovereign towns of Italy had to be organized, in consequence of the Social war, as burgess- communities.
Now the centralization of the community was abandoned, partly through the admission of the half-burgess communities to the full franchise, partly through the accession of numerous more remote burgess-colonies to its ranks; but the older system of incorporation was not resumed with reference to the allied communities.
This law therefore not only revived the plans of conquest beyond the Alps and the projects of Transalpine and transmarine colonization, which Gaius Gracchus and Flaccus had sketched, on the most extensive scale; but, by admitting the Italians along with the Romans to emigration and yet undoubtedly prescribing the erection of all the new communities as burgess-colonies, it formed a first step towards satisfying the claims to which it was so difficult to give effect, and which yet could not be in the long run refused of the Italians to be placed on an equality with the Romans.
In 502, shortly after the expedition of Regulus to Africa, they amounted to 298,000 men capable of bearing arms; thirty years later, shortly before the commencement of the Hannibalic war , they had fallen off to 270,000, or about a tenth, and again twenty years after that, shortly before the end of the same war , to 214,000, or about a fourth; and a generation afterwards during which no extraordinary losses occurred, but the institution of the great burgess-colonies in the plain of northern Italy in particular occasioned a perceptible and exceptional increase the numbers of the burgesses had hardly again reached the point at which they stood at the commencement of this period.
Beyond this boundary the adjacent properly Gallic territory as far as, and including, Ravenna belonged in a similar way as did Italy proper to the Roman alliance; the Senones, who had formerly settled there, were extirpated in the war of 471-2, and the several townships were connected with Rome, either as burgess-colonies, like Sena Gallica, or as allied towns, whether with Latin rights, like Ariminum, or with Italian rights, like Ravenna.
This law therefore not only revived the plans of conquest beyond the Alps and the projects of Transalpine and transmarine colonization, which Gaius Gracchus and Flaccus had sketched, on the most extensive scale; but, by admitting the Italians along with the Romans to emigration and yet undoubtedly prescribing the erection of all the new communities as burgess-colonies, it formed a first step towards satisfying the claims to which it was so difficult to give effect, and which yet could not be in the long run refused of the Italians to be placed on an equality with the Romans.
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