families of Roman
farmers were presumably to be even now found scattered throughout
Italy, either isolated or united in villages.

Subject Communities

Among the subject communities the passive burgesses (-cives sine
suffragio-) apart from the privilege of electing and being elected,
stood on an equality of rights and duties with the full burgesses.
Their legal position was regulated by the decrees of the Roman comitia
and the rules issued for them by the Roman praetor, which, however,
were doubtless based essentially on the previous arrangements.
Justice was administered for them by the Roman praetor or his deputies
(-praefecti-) annually sent to the individual communities. Those of
them in a better position, such as the city of Capua,(31) retained
self-administration and along with it the continued use of the native
language, and had officials of their own who took charge of the levy
and the census. The communities of inferior rights such as Caere(32)
were deprived even of self-administration, and this was doubtless the
most oppressive among the different forms of subjection. However, as
was above remarked, there is already apparent at the close of this
period an effort to incorporate these communities, at least so far
as they were -de facto- Latinized, among the full burgesses.

Latins

Among the subject communities the most privileged and most important
class was that of the Latin towns, which obtained accessions equally
numerous and important in the autonomous communities founded by Rome
within and even beyond Italy--the Latin colonies, as they were called
--and was always increasing in consequence of new settlements of the
same nature. These new urban communities of Roman origin, but with
Latin rights, became more and more the real buttresses of the Roman
rule over Italy. These Latins, however, were by no means those with
whom the battles of the lake Regillus and Trifanum had been fought.
They were not those old members of the Alban league, who reckoned
themselves originally equal to, if not better than, the community of
Rome, and who felt the dominion of Rome to be an oppressive yoke, as
the fearfully rigorous measures of security taken against Praeneste
at the beginning of the war with Pyrrhus, and the collisions that
evidently long continued to occur with the Praenestines in particular,
show. This old Latium had essentially either perished or become
merged in Rome, and it now numbered but few communi