de pont- of the Etruscans on the left bank of the Tiber, was contested between the Latins and the Etruscans—­in other words, between the Romans and Veientes—­with varying results.  The struggle with Gabii, which held the plain between the Anio and the Alban hills, was for a long period equally balanced:  down to late times the Gabine dress was deemed synonymous with that of war, and Gabine ground the prototype of hostile soil.(2) By these conquests the Roman territory was probably extended to about 190 square miles.  Another very early achievement of the Roman arms was preserved, although in a legendary dress, in the memory of posterity with greater vividness than those obsolete struggles:  Alba, the ancient sacred metropolis of Latium, was conquered and destroyed by Roman troops.  How the collision arose, and how it was decided, tradition does not tell:  the battle of the three Roman with the three Alban brothers born at one birth is nothing but a personification of the struggle between two powerful and closely related cantons, of which the Roman at least was triune.  We know nothing at all beyond the naked fact of the subjugation and destruction of Alba by Rome.(3)

It is not improbable, although wholly a matter of conjecture, that, at the same period when Rome was establishing herself on the Anio and on the Alban hills, Praeneste, which appears at a later date as mistress of eight neighbouring townships, Tibur, and others of the Latin communities were similarly occupied in enlarging their territory and laying the foundations of their subsequent far from inconsiderable power.

Treatment of the Earliest Acquisitons

We feel the want of accurate information as to the legal character and legal effects of these early Latin conquests, still more than we miss the records of the wars in which they were won.  Upon the whole it is not to be doubted that they were treated in accordance with the system of incorporation, out of which the tripartite community of Rome had arisen; excepting that the cantons who were compelled by arms to enter the combination did not, like the primitive three, preserve some sort of relative independence as separate regions in the new united community, but became so entirely merged in the general whole as to be no longer traced.(4) However far the power of a Latin canton might extend, in the earliest times it tolerated no political centre except the proper capital; and still less founded independent settlements, such as the Phoenicians and the Greeks established, thereby creating in their colonies clients for the time being and future rivals to the mother city.  In this respect, the treatment which Ostia experienced from Rome deserves special notice:  the Romans could not and did not wish to prevent the rise -de facto- of a town at that spot, but they allowed the place no political independence, and accordingly they did not bestow on those who settled