Gracchi Marius and Sulla | Page 9

demarcation between the two peoples may have grown less clearly defined. [Sidenote: The Praefectura.] Praefectura was the generic name for Roman colonies and for all Municipia to which prefects were sent annually to administer justice. [Sidenote: Municipia] Municipia are supposed to have been originally those conquered Italian towns to which Connubium and Commercium, i.e. rights of intermarriage and of trade, were given, but from whom Jus Suffragii and Jus Honorum were withheld. These privileges, however, were conferred on them before the Social War. Some were governed by Roman magistrates and some were self-governed. They voted in the Roman tribes, though probably only at important crises, such as the agitation for an agrarian law. They were under the jurisdiction of the Praetor Urbanus, but vicarious justice was administered among them by an official called Praefectus juri dicundo, sent yearly from Rome.
[Sidenote: The Latini.] The Latini had no vote at Rome, no right of holding offices, and were practically Roman subjects. A Roman who joined a Latin colony ceased to be a Roman citizen. Whether there was any difference between the internal administration of a Latin colony and an old Latin town is uncertain. The Latini may have had Commercium and Connubium, or only the former. They certainly had not Jus Suffragii or Jus Honorum, and they were in subjection to Rome. A Latin could obtain the Roman franchise, but the mode of doing so at this time is a disputed point. Livy mentions a law which enabled a Latin to obtain the franchise by migrating to Rome and being enrolled in the census, provided he left children behind him to fill his place. There is no doubt that either legally or irregularly Latini did migrate to Rome and did so obtain the citizenship, but we know no more. Others say that the later right by which a Latin obtained the citizenship in virtue of filling a magistracy in his native town existed already.
[Sidenote: The Socii.] Of the Socii, all or many of them had treaties defining their relations to Rome, and were therefore known as Foederatae Civitates. They had internal self-government, but were bound to supply Rome with soldiers, ships, and sailors.
[Sidenote: Grievances of the Latins and allies.] At the time of the Gracchi discontent was seething among the Latins and allies. There were two classes among them--the rich landlords and capitalists, who prospered as the rich at Rome prospered, and the poor who were weighed down by debt or were pushed out of their farms by slave-labour, or were hangers-on of the rich in the towns and eager for distributions of land. The poor were oppressed no doubt by the rich men both of their own cities and of Rome. The rich chafed at the intolerable insolence of Roman officials. It was not that Rome interfered with the local self-government she had granted by treaty, but the Italians laboured under grievous disabilities and oppression. So late as the Jugurthine war, Latin officers were executed by martial law, whereas any Roman soldier could appeal to a civil tribunal. Again, while the armies had formerly been recruited from the Romans and the allies equally, now the severest service and the main weight of wars fell on the latter, who furnished, moreover, two soldiers to every Roman. Again, without a certain amount of property, a man at Rome could not be enrolled in the army; but the rule seems not to have applied to Italians. Nor was the civil less harsh than the military administration. A consul's wife wished to use the men's bath at Teanum; and because the bathers were not cleared out quickly enough, and the baths were not clean enough, M. Marius, the chief magistrate of the town, was stripped and scourged in the market-place. A free herdsman asked in joke if it was a corpse that was in a litter passing through Venusia, and which contained a young Roman. Though not even an official, its occupant showed that, if lazy, he was at least alive, by having the peasant whipped to death with the litter straps. In short, the rich Italians would feel the need of the franchise as strongly as the old plebeians had felt it, and all the more strongly because the Romans had not only ceased to enfranchise whole communities, but were chary of giving the citizenship even to individuals. The poor also had the ordinary grievances against their own rich, and were so far likely to favour the schemes of any man who assailed the capitalist class, Roman or Italian, as a whole; but they none the less disliked Roman supremacy, and would be easily persuaded to attribute to that supremacy some of the hardships which it did not cause.
[Sidenote: State of the transmarine provinces.] While such fires were slowly coming to the surface in