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How the Municipa Worked in Ancient Rome
Incorporation of municipia into the larger Roman state did not involve a drastic rearrangement of these communities’ internal social arrangements. Like Rome, their social orders were firmly hierarchical. In each, a handful of leading families regularly filled most of the city’s political and religious offices. Some families may not have survived their city’s defeat or maintained their social position in new circumstances, but many others did survive and continued to dominate their communities; so long as they remained loyal, Roman magistrates would preserve them against domestic unrest. For some of these municipal elites, their newly acquired Roman citizenship would have proven especially valuable. The leading families of many Latin communities, which for long had had close, if sometimes tense, relations with Rome, may have intermarried with prominent Roman families from a relatively early date; incorporation within the larger Roman community apparently accelerated this process. Wealthy families in some municipia sine suffragio, such as Capua, also formed marriage alliances with Roman families, although this may have been a slower development. Eventually, some municipal families would become part of the Roman political elite, holding offices and serving in the senate of Rome itself. Centuries later, the elites of many Italian communities, including Rome, would be linked by networks of family relationships.
This said, the Romans also treated some defeated communities in ways that disrupted their social and political arrangements. Victorious Roman armies plundered the camps of armies they defeated in battle as well as the cities they took by storm, and Rome often imposed penalties on communities that had fought too hard or resisted too long, confiscating land and displacing or enslaving the inhabitants. Roman citizens, as individuals, could take up small allotments of some of this captured land in what are known as “viritane” assignments. Other portions of it went to groups of settlers in colonies.
Seeking to hold new territory or allies by founding colonies was an old Roman and Latin practice, but now the process became considerably more formalized and under Rome’s exclusive control. Colonies were to be fully functioning city states with their own fighting forces and capable of their own defense. In some colonies, the settlers remained Roman citizens and were enrolled in a tribe. Such citizen colonies were small 300 adult men and they were generally situated along the coast, at harbors, or at the mouths of rivers. Most colonies were larger, however, with 2,500, 4,000, or 6,000 adult male settlers; colonists in these new communities lost Roman citizenship, but they received instead the privileges enjoyed by the citizens of towns with Latin status. From the late fourth to the early second century, the Romans established at least fifty-three colonies in Italy at locations open to enemy attack, in recently subjugated regions liable to revolt, at strategic river crossings and road junctions, and on vulnerable sections of coastline. To create a colony, the Romans chose three men (triumviri coloniae deducendae), generally high ranking former magistrates, to lead out the colonists to a site, and there give them land and establish the necessary institutions of self government. Each colony was to have as its center a fortified settlement, which was the residence of most of the colonists and the site of its government and public cults. In some cases, the founders located the new settlement in a town or fortification from which the original inhabitants had been expelled; in others, they began the process of building a completely new town. Alba Fucens, founded in 303 on land taken from the Aequi, and Cosa, established in 273 on land that Etruscan Caere lost, are the best known Latin colonies of the period. Both were founded on high, inaccessible hills. Excavations have shown that the founders fixed the line of the urban fortifications, and marked out the streets and the sites for the local forum, comitium, and temples. In the process, triumvirs and settlers sometimes appro priated sacred sites of the displaced population; on other occasions, they created new sites, patterned on Rome’s. One Roman writer later would describe colonies like these as “small images of the Roman people”. In Latin colonies, a few colonists received larger allotments so that they might serve as the governing elite of the new city.
