al in
the ownership of Roman burgesses mostly dwelling together in market-
villages (-fora-). The not numerous allied townships to the south of
the Po, particularly Ravenna, as well as the whole country between the
Po and the Alps was, in consequence of a law brought in by the consul
Strabo in 665, organized after the Italian urban constitution, so that
the communities not adapted for this, more especially the townships in
the Alpine valleys, were assigned to particular towns as dependent and
tributary villages. These new town-communities, however, were not
presented with the Roman franchise, but, by means of the legal fiction
that they were Latin colonies, were invested with those rights which
had hitherto belonged to the Latin towns of inferior legal position.
Thus Italy at that time ended practically at the Po, while the
Transpadane country was treated as an outlying dependency. Here
to the north of the Po, with the exception of Cremona, Eporedia
and Aquileia, there were no burgess or Latin colonies, and even
the native tribes here had been by no means dislodged as they were
to the south of the Po. The abolition of the Celtic cantonal, and
the introduction of the Italian urban, constitution paved the way
for the Romanizing of the rich and important territory; this was the
first step in the long and momentous transformation of the Gallic stock--
which once stood contrasted with Italy, and the assaults of which
Italy had rallied to repel--into comrades of their Italian masters.

Considerable as these concessions were, if we compare them with the
rigid exclusiveness which the Roman burgess-body had retained for
more than a hundred and fifty years, they were far from involving a
capitulation with the actual insurgents; they were on the contrary
intended partly to retain the communities that were wavering and
threatening to revolt, partly to draw over as many deserters as
possible from the ranks of the enemy. To what extent these laws and
especially the most important of them--that of Caesar--were applied,
cannot be accurately stated, as we are only able to specify in general
terms the extent of the insurrection at the time when the law was
issued. The main matter at any rate was that the communities hitherto
Latin--not only the survivors of the old Latin confederacy, such as
Tibur and Praeneste, but more especially the Latin colonies, with the
exception of the few that passed over to the insurgents--were thereby
a