rule by a military despotism. The ideal of the Italian was quiescence; the scattered voters with no corporate organisation were more prone to look to persons than to causes; sometimes there was a wave of municipal enthusiasm, but many an Italian township recognised no leader but its Roman patron, and saw in his success at the polls the highest use to which they could put their suffrage.
The second great problem was that of the future administrative relations of Rome to these incorporated townships. The growth of the municipal idea was not a new one. Even as early as the beginning of the second century B.C. the possibility had been demonstrated of combining active internal independence with the possession of the full Roman civitas. Arpinum had received the full citizenship in 188 B.C., and its citizens vote henceforward in the Cornelian tribe;[1] but its internal autonomy was not destroyed, for the town was still legislating for itself in 115 B.C.[2] Meanwhile there are signs that a higher type of organisation was being given to Roman colonies; at least duovirs, who may be duoviri juri dicundo, are found at Puteoli in 105 B.C.[3] This idea of some political and judicial independence being enjoyed by townships, which had become a part of Rome, was worked out on the grandest scale after the social war; but the turbulent times which followed were not suited to comprehensive municipal legislation, and it is not likely that a definite system, which adjusted local to central powers, was developed before the Augustan period. Something had however been done in Cicero's time. Here and there we find a local constitution remodelled,[4] and there is evidence that there was already some division of competence between the local magistrate and the praetor urbanus in civil jurisdiction—the defendant being in some cases compelled to give bail (vadimonium) to bring his case to Rome.[5]
- ↑ Liv. xxxviii. 36.
- ↑ Cicero says that his grandfather, in or just before the consulship of Scaurus (115 B.C.), "restitit M. Gratidio . . . ferenti legem tabellariam" (de Leg. iii. 16, 36).
- ↑ C.I.L. i. p. 163.
- ↑ A fragment of a constitution of Tarentum, dating apparently from a time not long subsequent to the lex Julia of 90 B.C., has been preserved (Fragmentum Tarentinum in L'Année Épigraphique, 1896, pp. 30, 31). Arpinum was undergoing reorganisation in 46 B.C. (Cic. ad Fam. xiii. 11, 3).
- ↑ Cic. in Verr. v. 13, 34 "unum illud, quod ita fuit illustre notumque omnibus, ut nemo tam rusticanus homo L. Lucullo et M. Cotta consulibus (74 B.C.) Romam ex ullo municipio vadimonii causa venerit quin sciret jura omnia praetoris urbani nutu . . . Chelidonis . . . gubernari."
