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Updated: April 30, 2025
As a municipium, the rights of Praeneste were shared by only one other city in the league.
In criminal procedure presumably all capital causes, and in civil procedure those more difficult cases which presumed an independent action on the part of the directing magistrate, were reserved for the authorities and jurymen of the capital, and the Italian municipal courts were restricted to the minor and less complicated lawsuits, or to those which were very urgent. Rise of the -Municipium-
The peculiar status of municipium was granted in the early Empire especially to native provincial towns which had become Romanized without official Roman action or settlement of Roman soldiers or citizens, and which had, as it were, merited municipal privileges.
In fact, the position which Praeneste held during the rise and fall of the Latin League has distinct differences from that of any other town in the confederation, and these differences are to be seen in every stage of her history, whether as an ally, a municipium, or a colonia. This is proved by the right of exile which both Praeneste and Tibur still retained until as late as 90 B.C.
Their basis was in general the constitution of the former formally sovereign Latin community, or, so far as their constitution in its principles resembled the Roman, that of the Roman old-patrician-consular community; only care was taken to apply to the same institutions in the -municipium- names different from, and inferior to, those used in the capital, or, in other words, in the state.
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.
It has been shown that the city did not inherit any such position from its immediate predecessor the Roman municipium, which we have learnt to consider as overthrown, from a constitutional standpoint as annihilated; but that the new principle introduced into state life by the northern conquerors of Italy, the principle of administration by county rather than by urban divisions, relegated the city to an inferior place as part of a rural holding, instead of leaving it the centre of a circle of rural dependencies.
There seems to be, however, very good reasons for saying that Praeneste never became a municipium in the strict legal sense of the word. It only salved the pride of the Praenestines, for it gave them a name which showed a former sovereign federated state, and not the name of a colony planted by the Romans. The cogency of this fourth reason will bear elaboration.
In criminal procedure presumably all capital causes, and in civil procedure those more difficult cases which presumed an independent action on the part of the directing magistrate, were reserved for the authorities and jurymen of the capital, and the Italian municipal courts were restricted to the minor and less complicated lawsuits, or to those which were very urgent. Rise of the -Municipium-
She was not a municipium which, like Lanuvium and Tusculum, kept a separate state, but whose citizens, although called Roman citizens, were without right to vote, nor, on the other hand, was she in the class of municipia of which Aricia is a type, towns which had no vote in Rome, but were governed from there like a city ward. Praeneste, on the contrary, belonged to yet a third class.
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