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Updated: June 20, 2025
At the close of this period the Roman burgess-body, in a tolerably compact mass, filled Latium in its widest sense, Sabina, and a part of Campania, so that it reached on the west coast northward to Caere and southward to Cumae; within this district there were only a few cities not included in it, such as Tibur, Praeneste, Signia, Norba, and Ferentinum.
The old organization collapses irretrievably. The Roman commonwealth was planned as an urban community, which through its free burgess-body gave to itself rulers and laws; which was governed by these well-advised rulers within these legal limits with kingly freedom; and around which the Italian confederacy, as an aggregate of free urban communities essentially homogeneous and cognate with the Roman, and the body of extra-Italian allies, as an aggregate of Greek free cities and barbaric peoples and principalities both more superintended, than domineered over, by the community of Rome formed a double circle.
With the subjugation of Italy the Roman burgess-body had closed its ranks; the bestowal of the franchise on whole communities was totally given up, its bestowal on individuals was greatly restricted.
An attempt was also made to give once more a serious importance to the office of the censors, and by that agency to purge the deeply disordered burgess-body of the worst rabble. All these measures were adopted under the pressure of the sword.
Considerable as these concessions were, if we compare them with the rigid exclusiveness which the Roman burgess-body had retained for more than a hundred and fifty years, they were far from involving a capitulation with the actual insurgents; they were on the contrary intended partly to retain the communities that were wavering and threatening to revolt, partly to draw over as many deserters as possible from the ranks of the enemy.
It was instinctively felt that this misery, this disgrace, this disorder were too colossal to be the work of any one man. As the greatness of the Roman commonwealth was the work not of prominent individuals, but rather of a soundly-organized burgess-body, so the decay of this mighty structure was the result not of the destructive genius of individuals, but of a general disorganization.
The non-burgesses indeed gained by it burgess-rights, and the new burgess-body acquired in the -comitia centuriata- comprehensive prerogatives; but the right of rejection on the part of the patrician senate, which in firm and serried ranks confronted the -comitia- as if it were an Upper House, legally hampered their freedom of movement precisely in the most important matters, and although not in a position to thwart the serious will of the collective body, could yet practically delay and cripple it.
II. VII. The Full Roman Franchise II. VII. Subject Communities III. VIII. Declaration of War by Rome II. III. The Burgess-Body III. XI. Patricio-Plebian Nobility The laying out of the circus is attested. II. II. Political Value of the Tribunate III. IX. Landing of the Romans III. IX. Death of Scipio. III. XI. Patricio-Plebian Nobility II. III. New Opposition III. III. The Celts Conquered by Rome
While a complete legal equality therefore had subsisted within the old burgess-body, the new burgess-body or former metoeci came to be in this way divided from the first into a number of privileged families and a multitude kept in a position of inferiority.
With the subjugation of Italy the Roman burgess-body had closed its ranks; the bestowal of the franchise on whole communities was totally given up, its bestowal on individuals was greatly restricted.
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