the league of the Romans and Latins (268), an accession which isolated the Volscians completely, and provided the league with a bulwark against the Sabellian tribes dwelling on the south and east; it is easy therefore to perceive why this little people obtained the concession of full equality with the two others in counsel and in distribution of the spoil.  The feebler Aequi were thenceforth but little formidable; it was sufficient to undertake from time to time a plundering expedition against them.  The Rutuli also, who bordered with Latium on the south in the plain along the coast, early succumbed; their town Ardea was converted into a Latin colony as early as 312.(12) The Volscians opposed a more serious resistance.  The first notable success, after those mentioned above, achieved over them by the Romans was, remarkably enough, 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