and the ultimate
formation of an alliance between them and Rome. The favorable position of
the city on the Tiber for trade and defence gave it a great advantage over
its rivals, and it soon became the commercial and political centre of the
neighboring territory. The most important of these villages, Tusculum,
Praeneste, and Lanuvium, were not more than twenty miles distant, and the
people in them must have come constantly to Rome to attend the markets,
and in later days to vote, to hear political speeches, and to listen to
plays in the theatre. Some of them probably heard the jests at the expense
of their dialectal peculiarities which Plautus introduced into his
comedies. The younger generations became ashamed of their provincialisms;
they imitated the Latin spoken in the metropolis, and by the second
century of our era, when the Latin grammarians have occasion to cite
dialectal peculiarities from Latium outside Rome, they quote at
second-hand from Varro of the first century B.C., either because they will
not take the trouble to use their own ears or because the differences
which were noted in earlier days had ceased to exist. The first stage in
the conquest of the world by the Latin of Rome comes to an end, then, with
the extension of that form of speech throughout Latium.

Beyond the limits of Latium it came into contact with Oscan and the other
Italic dialects, which were related to Latin, but of course were much
farther removed from it than the Latin of Tusculum or Lanuvium had
been,[2] so that the adoption of Latin was not so simple a matter as the
acceptance of Roman Latin by the villages of Latium near Rome had been.

The conflict which went on between Latin and its Italic kinsmen is
revealed to us now and then by a Latin inscription, into which Oscan or
Umbrian forms have crept.[3] The struggle had come to an end by the
beginning of our era. A few Oscan inscriptions are found scratched on the
walls of Pompeii after the first earthquake, in 63 A.D., but they are late
survivals, and no Umbrian inscriptions are known of a date subsequent to
the first century B.C.

The Social War of 90-88 B.C., between Rome and the Italians, was a
turning-point in the struggle between Latin and the Italic dialects,
because it marks a change in the political treatment of Rome's
dependencies in Italy. Up to this time she had followed the policy of
isolating all her Italian conquered communities from one another. She was
anxious to p