PRAENESTE AS A COLONY.

From the time of Sulla to the establishment of the monarchy, the expropriation of territory for discharged soldiers found its expression in great part in the change from Italian cities to colonies,[230] and of the colonies newly made by Sulla, Praeneste was one.  The misfortunes that befell Praeneste, because she seemed doomed to be on the losing side in quarrels, were never more disastrously exemplified than in the punishment inflicted upon her by Sulla, because she had taken the side of Marius.  Thousands of her citizens were killed (see note 63), her fortifications were thrown down, a great part of her territory was taken and given to Sulla’s soldiers, who were the settlers of his new-made colony.  At once the city government of Praeneste changed.  Instead of a senate, there was now a decuria (decuriones, ordo); instead of praetors, duovirs with judicial powers (iure dicundo), in short, the regular governmental officialdom for a Roman colony.  The city offices were filled partly by the new colonists, and the new government which was forced upon her was so thoroughly established, that Praeneste remained a colony as long as her history can be traced in the inscriptions.  As has been said, in the time of Tiberius she got back an empty title, that of municipium, but it had been nearly forgotten again by Hadrian’s time.

There are several unanswered questions which arise at this point.  What was the distribution of offices in the colony after its foundation; what regulation, if any, was there as to the proportion of officials to the new make up of the population; and what and who were the quinquennial duovirs?  From the proportionately large fragments of municipal fasti left from Praeneste it will be possible to reach some conclusions that may be of future value.

THE DISTRIBUTION OF OFFICES.

The beginning of this question comes from a passage in Cicero,[231] which says that the Sullan colonists in Pompeii were preferred in the offices, and had a status of citizenship better than that of the old inhabitants of the city.  Such a state of affairs might also seem natural in a colony which had just been deprived of one third of its land, and had had forced upon it as citizens a troop of soldiers who naturally would desire to keep the city offices as far as possible in their own control.[232] Dessau thinks that because this unequal state of citizenship was found in Pompeii, which was a colony of Sulla’s, it must have been found also in Praeneste, another of his colonies.[233] Before entering into the question of whether or not this can be proved, it will be well to mention three probable reasons why Dessau is wrong in his contention.  The first, an argumentum ex silentio, is that if there was trouble in Pompeii between the old inhabitants and the new colonists then the same would have been true in Praeneste!