Enjoyment of their own laws and control of their own courts were other symbols of the autonomy of the allies. Rome could not legislate for the Italian socii, and they were beyond the judicial authority of the Roman magistrate in Italy. But the necessities of social and commercial intercourse rendered it advisable that the Italian allies—more especially the Latins—should be brought into close legal relations with Rome, and the acceptance by the latter of innumerable civil laws of the central state is attested by Cicero.[1] The Italians are known to have been bound by a plebiscitum concerning loans[2]—this, however, only made contracts of a certain kind between them and Romans invalid, and may not have demanded their consent; but their formal acceptance must have been required for the Didian law, which extended the sumptuary regulations of the lex Fannia to all the Italici.[3] The "free" as well as the "federate" city has the right to accept or decline a legislative proposal put before it by the Roman government.[4] Closest of all to Rome were the Latins. As members of federate cities they were amongst the socii,[5] and it is only as a class with special privileges that they are distinguished from the latter.[6] Latinitas had, through the efforts of colonisation, long lost its geographical and ethnic significance. It was the name for a status often accepted by Roman citizens, which combined the anomalies of sovereignty and a partial Roman citizenship. The sovereign rights are those possessed by the socii, the civic privileges were originally those held by the municipia; but it is possible that on and after the foundation of Ariminum and the last twelve Latin colonies[7] commercium alone was granted, conubium*
- ↑ Cic. pro Balbo 8, 21 "innumerabiles aliae leges de civili jure sunt latae; quas Latini voluerunt, adsciverunt."
- ↑ Liv. xxxv. 7 (193 B.C.) "M. Sempronius tribunus plebis . . . plebem rogavit plebesque scivit ut cum sociis ac nomine Latino creditae pecuniae jus idem quod cum civibus Romanis esset." The enactment was produced by the discovery that Roman creditors escaped the usury laws by using Italians as their agents.
- ↑ Macrob. Sat. iii. 17, 6.
- ↑ Cic. pro Balbo 8, 20 "foederatos populos fieri fundos oportere . . . non magis est proprium foederatorum quam omnium liberorum." For the formula of acceptance ("fundi—i.e. auctores—facti sunt") cf. Festus p. 89.
- ↑ Cic. pro Balbo 24, 54 "Latinis, id est foederatis."
- ↑ The distinction is expressed in the familiar socii ac nominis Latini (Liv. xli. 8), socii et Latium (Sall. Hist. i. 17), and perhaps in socii Latini nominis, if this last expression is to be regarded as an asyndeton.
- ↑ These twelve colonies, with the dates of their foundations, are—Ariminum (268 B.C.), Beneventum (268), Firmum (264), Aesernia (263), Brundisium (244),
