Allies

The position of the non-Latin allies had, as we have mentioned before,(27) undergone a change greatly to their disadvantage in consequence of the Hannibalic war.  Only a few communities in this category, such as Neapolis, Nola, Rhegium, and Heraclea, had during all the vicissitudes of that war remained steadfastly on the Roman side, and therefore retained their former rights as allies unaltered; by far the greater portion were obliged in consequence of having changed sides to acquiesce in a revision of the existing treaties to their disadvantage.  The reduced position of the non-Latin allies is attested by the emigration from their communities into the Latin:  when in 577 the Samnites and Paelignians applied to the senate for a reduction of their contingents, their request was based on the ground that during late years 4000 Samnite and Paelignian families had migrated to the Latin colony of Fregellae.

Latins

That the Latins—­which term now denoted the few towns in old Latium that were not included in the Roman burgess-union, such as Tibur and Praeneste, the allied cities placed in law on the same footing with them, such as several of the Hernican towns, and the Latin colonies dispersed throughout Italy—­were still at this time in a better position, is implied in their very name; but they too had, in proportion, hardly less deteriorated.  The burdens imposed on them were unjustly increased, and the pressure of military service was more and more devolved from the burgesses upon them and the other Italian allies.  For instance, in 536, nearly twice as many of the allies were called out as of the burgesses:  after the end of the Hannibalic war all the burgesses received their discharge, but not all the allies; the latter were chiefly employed for garrison duty and for the odious service in Spain; in the triumphal largess of 577 the allies received not as formerly an equal share with the burgesses, but only the half, so that amidst the unrestrained rejoicing of that soldiers’ carnival the divisions thus treated as inferior followed the chariot of victory in sullen silence:  in the assignations of land in northern Italy the burgesses received ten jugera of arable land each, the non-burgesses three -jugera- each.  The unlimited liberty of migration had already at an earlier period been taken from the Latin communities, and migration to Rome was only allowed to them in the event of their leaving behind children of their own and a portion of their estate in the community which had been their home.(28) But these burdensome requirements were in various ways evaded or transgressed; and the crowding of the burgesses of Latin townships to Rome, and the complaints of their magistrates as to the increasing depopulation of the cities and the impossibility under such circumstances of furnishing the fixed contingent, led the Roman government to institute police-ejections from the capital on a large scale (567, 577).  The measure