In this case all the dispossessed burgesses - but these only - were deprived of their municipal, and at the same time of the Roman, franchise, receiving in return the lowest Latin rights[7]. Sulla thus avoided furnishing the opposition with a nucleus in Italian subject-communities of inferior rights; the homeless dispossessed of necessity were soon lost in the mass of the proletariate.
In Campania not only was the democratic colony of Capua done away and its domain given back to the state, as was naturally to be expected, but the island of Aenaria (Ischia) was also, probably about this time, withdrawn from the community of Neapolis. In Latium the whole territory of the large and wealthy city of Praeneste and presumably of Norba also was confiscated, as was likewise that of Spoletium in Umbria. Sulmo in the Paelignian district was even razed. But the iron arm of the regent fell with especial weight on the two regions which had offered a serious resistance up to the end and even after the battle at the Colline gate - Etruria and Samnium. There a number of the most considerable communes, such as Florentia, Faesulae, Arretium, Volaterrae, were visited with total confiscation. Of the fate of Samnium we have already spoken; there was no confiscation there, but the land was laid waste for ever, its flourishing towns, even the former Latin colony of Aesernia, were left in ruins, and the country was placed on the same footing with the Bruttian and Lucanian regions.
These arrangements as to the property of the Italian soil placed on the one hand those Roman domain-lands which had been handed over in usufruct to the former allied communities and now on their dissolution reverted to the Roman government, and on the other hand the confiscated territories of the communities incurring punishment, at the disposal of the regent; and he employed them for the purpose of settling thereon the soldiers of the victorious army. Most of these new settlements were directed towards Etruria, as for instance to Faesulae and Arretium, others to Latium and Campania, where Praeneste and Pompeii among other places became Sullan colonies. To repeople Samnium was, as we have said, no part of the regent's design. A great part of these assignations took place after the Gracchan mode, so that the settlers were attached to an already-existing urban community. The comprehensiveness of this settlement is shown by the number of land-allotments distributed, which is stated at 120,000; while yet some portions of land withal were otherwise applied, as in the case of the lands bestowed on the temple of Diana at Mount Tifata; others, such as the Volaterran domain and a part of the Arretine, remained undistributed; others in fine, according to the old abuse legally forbidden[8] but now reviving, were taken possession of on the part of Sulla's favourites by the right of occupation. The objects which Sulla aimed at in this colonization were of a varied kind. In the first place, he thereby redeemed the pledge given to his soldiers. Secondly, he in so doing adopted the idea, in which the reform-party and the moderate conservatives concurred, and in accordance with which he had himself as early as 666 arranged the establishment of a number of colonies - the idea namely of augmenting the number of the small agricultural proprietors in Italy by a breaking up of the larger possessions on the part of the government; how seriously he had this at heart is shown by the renewed prohibition of the throwing together of allotments. Lastly and especially, he saw in these settled soldiers as it were standing garrisons, who would protect his new constitution along with their own right of property. For this reason, where the whole territory was not confiscated, as at Pompeii, the colonists were not amalgamated with the urban-community, but the old burgesses and the colonists were constituted as two bodies of burgesses associated within the same enclosing wall. In other respects these colonial foundations were based, doubtless, like the older ones, on a decree of the people, but only indirectly, in so far as the regent constituted them by virtue of the clause of the Valerian law to that effect; in reality they originated from the ruler's plenitude of power, and so far recalled the freedom with which the former regal authority disposed of the state-property.
But, in so far as the contrast between the soldier and the burgess, which was in other instances done away by the very sending out of the soldiers or colonists, was intended to remain, and did remain, in force in the Sullan colonies even after their establishment, and these colonists formed, as it were, the standing array of the senate, they are not incorrectly designated, in contradistinction to the older ones, as military colonies.
Akin to this practical constituting of a standing army for the senate was the measure by which the regent selected from the slaves of the proscribed upwards of 10,000 of the youngest and most vigorous men, and manumitted them in a body. These new Cornelians, whose civil existence was linked to the legal validity of the institutions of their patron, were designed to be a sort of bodyguard for the oligarchy and to help it to command the city populace, on which, indeed, in the absence of a garrison everything in the capital now primarily depended.
These extraordinary supports on which the regent made the oligarchy primarily to rest, weak and ephemeral as they doubtless might appear even to their author, were yet its only possible buttresses, unless expedients were to be resorted to - such as the formal institution of a standing army in Rome and other similar measures - which would have put an end to the oligarchy far sooner than the attacks of demagogues. The permanent foundation of the ordinary governing power of the oligarchy of course could not but be the senate, with a power so increased and so concentrated that it presented a superiority to its non-organized opponents at every single point of attack. The system of compromises followed for forty years was at an end. The Gracchan constitution, still spared in the first Sullan reform of 666, was now utterly set aside. Since the time of Gaius Gracchus the government had conceded, as it were, the right of 'emeute to the proletariate of the capital, and bought it off by regular distributions of corn to the burgesses domiciled there; Sulla abolished these largesses. Gaius Gracchus had organized and consolidated the order of capitalists by the letting of the tenths and customs of the province of Asia in Rome; Sulla abolished the system of middlemen, and converted the former contributions of the Asiatics into fixed taxes, which were assessed on the several districts according to the valuation-rolls drawn up for the purpose of gathering in the arrears[9]. Gaius Gracchus had by entrusting the posts of jurymen to men of equestrian census procured for the capitalist class an indirect share in administering and in governing, which proved itself not seldom stronger than the official adminis-tration and government; Sulla abolished the equestrian and restored the senatorial courts. Gaius Gracchus or at any rate the Gracchan period had conceded to the equites a special place at the popular festivals, such as the senators had for long possessed[10]; Sulla abolished it and relegated the equites to the plebeian benches[11].
The equestrian order, created as such by Gaius Gracchus, was deprived of its political existence by Sulla. The senate was to exercise the supreme power in legislation, administration, and jurisdiction, unconditionally, indivisibly, and permanently, and was to be distinguished also by outward tokens not merely as a privileged, but as the only privileged, order.
7. II. VII. Latins. To this was added the peculiar aggravation that, while in other instances the right of the Latins, like that of the
8. IV. IV. The Domain Question under the Restoration.
9. That Sulla's assessment of the five years' arrears and of the war expenses levied on the communities of Asia (Appian, Mithr. 62 et al.) formed a standard for the future, is shown by the facts, that the distribution of Asia into forty districts is referred to Sulla (Cassiodor. Chron. 670) and that the Sullan apportionment was assumed as a basis in the case of subsequent imposts (Cic. pro Flacc. 14, 32), and by the further circumstance, that on occasion of building a fleet in 672 the sums applied for that purpose were deducted from the payment of tribute (
10. III. XI. Separation of the Orders in the Theatre.
11. IV. III. Insignia of the Equites. Tradition has not indeed informed us by whom that law was issued, which rendered it necessary that the earlier privilege should be renewed by the Roscian theatre-law of 687 (Becker-Friedlander, iv, 531); but under the circumstances the author of that law was undoubtedly Sulla.