the foundation of Circeii
in 361, which, as long as Antium and Tarracina continued free, can
only have held communication with Latium by sea. Attempts were often
made to occupy Antium, and one was temporarily successful in 287; but
in 295 the town recovered its freedom, and it was not till after the
Gallic conflagration that, in consequence of a violent war of thirteen
years (365-377), the Romans gained a decided superiority in the
Antiate and Pomptine territory. Satricum, not far from Antium, was
occupied with a Latin colony in 369, and not long afterwards probably
Antium itself as well as Tarracina.(13) The Pomptine territory was
secured by the founding of the fortress Setia (372, strengthened in
375), and was distributed into farm-allotments and burgess-districts
in the year 371 and following years. After this date the Volscians
still perhaps rose in revolt, but they waged no further wars
against Rome.

Crises within the Romano-Latin League

But the more decided the successes that the league of Romans, Latins,
and Hernici achieved against the Etruscans, Aequi, Volsci, and Rutuli,
the more that league became liable to disunion. The reason lay
partly in the increase of the hegemonic power of Rome, of which
we have already spoken as necessarily springing out of the existing
circumstances, but which nevertheless was felt as a heavy burden in
Latium; partly in particular acts of odious injustice perpetrated by
the leading community. Of this nature was especially the infamous
sentence of arbitration between the Aricini and the Rutuli in Ardea
in 308, in which the Romans, called in to be arbiters regarding a
border territory in dispute between the two communities, took it to
themselves; and when this decision occasioned in Ardea internal
dissensions in which the people wished to join the Volsci, while
the nobility adhered to Rome, these dissensions were still more
disgracefully employed as a pretext for the--already mentioned
--sending of Roman colonists into the wealthy city, amongst whom the
lands of the adherents of the party opposed to Rome were distributed
(312). The main cause however of the internal breaking up of the
league was the very subjugation of the common foe; forbearance ceased
on one side, devotedness ceased on the other, from the time when they
thought that they had no longer need of each other. The open breach
between the Latins and Hernici on the one hand and the Romans on the
other was more i