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Updated: May 7, 2025
The Italian confederacy had been merged in the urban community. The body of extra-Italian allies was in full course of being converted into a body of subjects. The whole organic classification of the Roman commonwealth had gone to wreck, and nothing was left but a crude mass of more or less disparate elements. The Prospect
Organization of the Provinces -Commercium- Property Autonomy This difference in the supreme administrative power was the essential distinction between the transmarine and continental possessions. The principles on which Rome had organized the dependent lands in Italy, were in great part transferred also to the extra-Italian possessions.
The better classes of society kept aloof more and more from service in the army, and the Roman and Italic middle class in general was disappearing; while on the other hand the considerable military resources of the extra-Italian allies and subjects had become available, and the Italian proletariate also, properly applied, afforded at least a very useful material for military objects.
The Italian and Extra-Italian Policy of Rome If, in conclusion, we glance back at the career of Rome from the union of Italy to the dismemberment of Macedonia, the universal empire of Rome, far from appearing as a gigantic plan contrived and carried out by an insatiable thirst for territorial aggrandizement, appears to have been a result which forced itself on the Roman government without, and even in opposition to, its wish.
Requisitions had begun to be made on the subjects even for the popular festivals in Rome; the unmeasured vexatious demands made on the Italian as well as extra-Italian communities by the aedile Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, for the festival which he had to provide, induced the senate officially to interfere against them . The liberties which Roman magistrates at the close of this period allowed themselves to take not only with the unhappy subjects, but even with the dependent free-states and kingdoms, are illustrated by the raids of Gaius Volso in Asia Minor, and above all by the scandalous proceedings in Greece during the war with Perseus.
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.
The Roman aristocracy had accomplished the preliminary condition required for this task the union of Italy; the task itself it never solved, but always regarded the extra-Italian conquests either as simply a necessary evil, or as a fiscal possession virtually beyond the pale of the state.
On the other hand even before the time of Marius, especially in the cavalry and the light infantry, extra-Italian subjects the heavy mounted troopers of Thrace, the light African cavalry, the excellent light infantry of the nimble Ligurians, the slingers from the Baleares were employed in ever-increasing numbers even beyond their own provinces for the Roman armies; and at the same time, while there was a want of qualified burgess-recruits, the non- qualified poorer burgesses pressed forward unbidden to enter the army; in fact, from the mass of the civic rabble without work or averse to it, and from the considerable advantages which the Roman war-service yielded, the enlistment of volunteers could not be difficult.
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