During the later Republic and the earlier Empire many Italian towns were founded or re-founded.  To this result several causes contributed.  Like the Greeks before them, the Romans of the Republic sent out from time to time compact bodies of emigrants whenever the home population had grown too large for its narrow space.  These bodies were each large enough to form a small town, and thus each migration meant—­or might mean—­the foundation of a new town full-grown from its birth.  The Greeks generally established new and politically independent towns.  The Romans followed another method.  Their colonists remained subject to Rome and constituted new centres of Roman rule, small quasi-fortresses of Roman dominion in outlying lands.  Often the military need for such a stronghold had more to do with the foundation of a ‘colonia’ than the presence of too many mouths in the city.  Cicero, speaking of a ‘colonia’ planted at Narbo (now Narbonne) in southern Gaul about 118 B.C., and planted perhaps with some regard to an actual overflow of population in contemporary Rome, calls it nevertheless ’a colonia of Roman citizens, a watch-tower of the Roman people, a bulwark against the wild tribes of Gaul’.  Those words state very clearly the main object of many such foundations under Republic and Empire alike.

Another reason for the establishment of ‘coloniae’ may be found in the history of the dying Republic and nascent Empire.  During the civil wars of Sulla, of Caesar and of Octavian, huge armies were brought into the field by the rival military chiefs.  As each conflict ended, huge masses of soldiery had to be discharged almost at once.  For the sake of future peace it was imperative that these men should be quickly settled in some form of civic life in which they would abide.  The form chosen was the familiar form of the ‘colonia’.  The time-expired soldiers were treated—­not altogether unreasonably—­as surplus population, and they were planted out in large bodies, sometimes in existing towns which needed population or at least a loyal population, sometimes in new towns established full-grown for the purpose.  This method of dealing with discharged soldiers was continued during the early Empire, though it was then employed somewhat intermittently and the ‘coloniae’ were oftener planted in the provinces than in Italy itself; indeed the establishment of Italian ‘coloniae’, as distinct from grants of colonial rank by way of honour, almost ceased after A.D. 68.

It is not easy to determine the number of such new foundations of towns in Italy.  Some seventy or eighty are recorded from the early and middle periods of the Republic—­previous to about 120 B.C.; Sulla added a dozen or so; Octavian (Augustus) in his earlier years established or helped to establish about thirty.[57] But these figures can hardly represent the whole facts.  The one certainty is that, through the causes just detailed, a very large number of the Italian towns were either founded full-grown or re-founded under new conditions during the later Roman Republic and the earlier Empire.  Few towns in Italy developed as Rome herself developed, expanding from small beginnings in a slow continuous growth which was governed by convenience and opportunism and untouched by any new birth or systematic reconstruction.