of necessity, the leading community was not precluded from making a larger requisition.  This at the same time involved an indirect taxation, as every community was bound itself to equip and to pay its own contingent.  Accordingly it was not without design that the supply of the most costly requisites for war devolved chiefly on the Latin, or non-Latin federate communities; that the war marine was for the most part kept up by the Greek cities; and that in the cavalry service the allies, at least subsequently, were called upon to furnish a proportion thrice as numerous as the Roman burgesses, while in the infantry the old principle, that the contingent of the allies should not be more numerous than the burgess army, still remained in force for a long time at least as the rule.

System of Government—­
Division and Classification of the Subjects

The system, on which this fabric was constructed and kept together, can no longer be ascertained in detail from the few notices that have reached us.  Even the numerical proportions of the three classes of subjects relatively to each other and to the full burgesses, can no longer be determined even approximately;(39) and in like manner the geographical distribution of the several categories over Italy is but imperfectly known.  The leading ideas on which the structure was based, on the other hand, are so obvious that it is scarcely necessary specially to set them forth.  First of all, as we have already said, the immediate circle of the ruling community was extended—­partly by the settlement of full burgesses, partly by the conferring of passive burgess-rights—­as far as was possible without completely decentralizing the Roman community, which was an urban one and was intended to remain so.  When the system of incorporation was extended up to and perhaps even beyond its natural limits, the communities that were subsequently added had to submit to a position of subjection; for a pure hegemony as a permanent relation was intrinsically impossible.  Thus not through any arbitrary monopolizing of sovereignty, but through the inevitable force of circumstances, by the side of the class of ruling burgesses a second class of subjects took its place.  It was one of the primary expedients of Roman rule to subdivide the governed by breaking up the Italian confederacies and instituting as large a number as possible of comparatively small communities, and to graduate the pressure of that rule according to the different categories of subjects.  As Cato in the government of his household took care that the slaves should not be on too good terms with one another, and designedly fomented variances and factions among them, so the Roman community acted on a great scale.  The expedient was not generous, but it was effectual.

Aristocratic Remodelling of the Constitutions of the Italian Communities