As it was so close to Rome, however, the trouble would have been much better known, and certainly Cicero would not have lost a chance to bring the state of affairs at Praeneste also into a comparison.  Second, the great pains Sulla took to rebuild the walls of Praeneste, to lay out a new forum, and especially to make such an extensive enlargement and so many repairs of the temple of Fortuna Primigenia, show that his efforts were not entirely to please his new colonists, but just as much to try to defer to the wishes and civic pride of the old settlers.  Third, the fact that a great many of the old inhabitants were left, despite the great slaughter at the capture of the city, is shown by the frequent recurrence in later inscriptions of the ancient names of the city, and by the fact that within twenty years the property of the soldier colonists had been bought up,[234] and the soldiers had died, or had moved to town, or reenlisted for foreign service.  Had there been much trouble between the colonists and the old inhabitants, or had the colonists taken all the offices, in either case they would not have been so ready to part with their land, which was a sort of patent to citizenship.

It is possible now to push the inquiry a point further.  Dessau has already seen[235] that in the time of Augustus members of the old families were again in possession of many municipal offices, but he thinks the Praenestines did not have as good municipal rights as the colonists in the years following the establishment of the colony.  There are six inscriptions[236] which contain lists more or less fragmentary of the magistrates of Praeneste, the duovirs, the aediles, and the quaestors.  Two of these inscriptions can be dated within a few years, for they show the election of Germanicus and Drusus Caesar, and of Nero and Drusus, the sons of Germanicus, to the quinquennial duovirate.[237] Two others[81] are certainly pieces of the same fasti because of several peculiarities,[239] and one other, a fragment, belongs to still another calendar.[240] It will first be necessary to show that these last-mentioned inscriptions can be referred to some time not much later than the founding of the colony at Praeneste by Sulla, before any use can be made of the names in the list to prove anything about the early distribution of officers in the colony.  Two of these inscriptions[238] should be placed, I think, very early in the annals of the colony.  They show a list of municipal officers whose names, with a single exception, which will be accounted for later, have only praenomen and nomen, a way of writing names which was common to the earlier inhabitants of Praeneste, and which seems to have made itself felt here in the names of the colonists.[241] Again, from the fact that in the only place in the inscriptions where the quinquennialship is mentioned, it is the simple term, without the prefixed duoviri.  In the later inscriptions from imperial times,[80] both forms are found, while in the year