country between the Po and the Alps was, in consequence of a law brought in by the consul Strabo in 665, organized after the Italian urban constitution, so that the communities not adapted for this, more especially the townships in the Alpine valleys, were assigned to particular towns as dependent and tributary villages.  These new town-communities, however, were not presented with the Roman franchise, but, by means of the legal fiction that they were Latin colonies, were invested with those rights which had hitherto belonged to the Latin towns of inferior legal position.  Thus Italy at that time ended practically at the Po, while the Transpadane country was treated as an outlying dependency.  Here to the north of the Po, with the exception of Cremona, Eporedia and Aquileia, there were no burgess or Latin colonies, and even the native tribes here had been by no means dislodged as they were to the south of the Po.  The abolition of the Celtic cantonal, and the introduction of the Italian urban, constitution paved the way for the Romanizing of the rich and important territory; this was the first step in the long and momentous transformation of the Gallic stock—­ which once stood contrasted with Italy, and the assaults of which Italy had rallied to repel—­into comrades of their Italian masters.

Considerable as these concessions were, if we compare them with the rigid exclusiveness which the Roman burgess-body had retained for more than a hundred and fifty years, they were far from involving a capitulation with the actual insurgents; they were on the contrary intended partly to retain the communities that were wavering and threatening to revolt, partly to draw over as many deserters as possible from the ranks of the enemy.  To what extent these laws and especially the most important of them—­that of Caesar—­were applied, cannot be accurately stated, as we are only able to specify in general terms the extent of the insurrection at the time when the law was issued.  The main matter at any rate was that the communities hitherto Latin—­not only the survivors of the old Latin confederacy, such as Tibur and Praeneste, but more especially the Latin colonies, with the exception of the few that passed over to the insurgents—­were thereby admitted to Roman citizenship.  Besides, the law was applied to the allied cities that remained faithful in Etruria and especially in Southern Italy, such as Nuceria and Neapolis.  It was natural that individual communities, hitherto specially privileged, should hesitate as to the acceptance of the franchise; that Neapolis, for example, should scruple to give up its former treaty with Rome—­which guaranteed to its citizens exemption from land-service and their Greek constitution, and perhaps domanial advantages besides—­for the restricted rights of new burgesses.  It was probably in virtue of conventions concluded on account of these scruples that this city, as well as Rhegium and perhaps other Greek communities