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.

The Cornelian Freedmen in Rome

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