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This jealousy manifested itself again in the way the leader of a contingent from Praeneste was treated by a Roman dictator in 319 B.C. But while these isolated outbursts of jealousy showed the ill feeling of Rome toward Praeneste, there is yet a stronger evidence of the fact that Praeneste had been in early times more than Rome's equal, for through the entire subsequent history of the aggrandizement of Rome at the expense of every other town in the Latin League, there runs a bitterness which finds expression in the slurs cast upon Praeneste, an ever-recurring reminder of the centuries of ancient grudge.
There are excellent works of art among the copper mirrors of Etruria as among the caskets of Praeneste; but it was a work of the latter kind, and in fact a work which most probably originated in the workshop of a Praenestine master at this epoch, regarding which it could with truth be affirmed that scarcely another product of the graving of antiquity bears the stamp of an art so finished in its beauty and characteristic expression, and yet so perfectly pure and chaste, as the Ficoroni -cista-.
Lastly the immigration and spreading of barbarian elements from many quarters and the incipient Latinizing of extensive Celtic and Spanish districts, naturally gave to Latin grammar and Latin instruction a higher importance than they could have had, so long as Latium only spoke Latin; the teacher of Latin literature had from the outset a different position in Comum and Narbo than he had in Praeneste and Ardea.
In fact nothing in the inscriptions or in the literature gives a hint at any change in the political relations between Praeneste and Rome down to 90 B.C., the year in which the lex Iulia was passed.
Engraving on metal, which in Latium decorated not the hand-mirror, as in Etruria, but the toilet-casket with its elegant outlines, was practised to a far less extent in Latium and almost exclusively in Praeneste.
It is to be remembered again that between the arches on the east and the solid wall on the west is a stretch of 200 feet of opus incertum, and a space where there is no wall at all. This lower wall of Praeneste occupies the same line as the ancient wall and escarpment, but the most of what survives was restored in Sulla's time.
This not only shows that Praeneste had lately received Roman citizenship, but implies also that Rome thus far had not dared to assume any control of the city, or the consul would not have felt so sure of his reception. Just what relation Praeneste bore to Rome between 90 or 89 B.C., when she accepted Roman citizenship, and 82 B.C. when Sulla made her a colony, is still an unsettled question.
Praeneste would never have asked for a return to the name municipium if it had not meant something.
With these words, the party passed the gateway, and came upon the mole, with the bay before them beautiful in the morning light. To the veteran sailor the plash of the waves was like a greeting. He drew a long breath, as if the perfume of the water were sweeter than that of the nard, and held his hand aloft. "My gifts were at Praeneste, not Antium and see! Wind from the west.
All the writers on Praeneste say that the ancient wall came on around the town where the lower wall of the monastery now is, and followed the western limit of the present town as far as the Porta San Martino. Returning now to plate II we observe a thin white line of wall which joins a black line running off at an angle to our left.
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