The origin of this Italian municipal system has not been recorded by tradition.  It is probable that its germs may be traced to exceptional regulations for the great burgess-colonies, which were founded at the end of the sixth century;(43) at least several, in themselves indifferent, formal differences between burgess-colonies and burgess—­municipia- tend to show that the new burgess-colony, which at that time practically took the place of the Latin, had originally a better position in state-law than the far older burgess--municipium-, and the advantage doubtless can only have consisted in a municipal constitution approximating to the Latin, such as afterwards belonged to all burgess-colonies and burgess—­municipia-.  The new organization is first distinctly demonstrable for the revolutionary colony of Capua;(44) and it admits of no doubt that it was first fully applied, when all the hitherto sovereign towns of Italy had to be organized, in consequence of the Social war, as burgess-communities.  Whether it was the Julian law, or the censors of 668, or Sulla, that first arranged the details, cannot be determined:  the entrusting of the censorial functions to the -duumviri- seems indeed to have been introduced after the analogy of the Sullan ordinance superseding the censorship, but may be equally well referred to the oldest Latin constitution to which also the censorship was unknown.  In any case this municipal constitution—­ inserted in, and subordinate to, the state proper—­is one of the most remarkable and momentous products of the Sullan period, and of the life of the Roman state generally.  Antiquity was certainly as little able to dovetail the city into the state as to develop of itself representative government and other great principles of our modern state-life; but it carried its political development up to those limits at which it outgrows and bursts its assigned dimensions, and this was the case especially with Rome, which in every respect stands on the line of separation and connection between the old and the new intellectual worlds.  In the Sullan constitution the primary assembly and the urban character of the commonwealth of Rome, on the one hand, vanished almost into a meaningless form; the community subsisting within the state on the other hand was already completely developed in the Italian -municipium-.  Down to the name, which in such cases no doubt is the half of the matter, this last constitution of the free republic carried out the representative system and the idea of the state built upon the basis of the municipalities.

The municipal system in the provinces was not altered by this movement; the municipal authorities of the non-free towns continued—­ special exceptions apart—­to be confined to administration and police, and to such jurisdiction as the Roman authorities did not prefer to take into their own hands.

Impression Produced by the Sullan Reorganization
Opposition of the Officers