Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/494

 488 MUNICIPAL REGIME DISAPPEARS. BOOK V. The historians say that the Romans dared to attack this city, though they were a colony from it. It was precisely because they were a colony from Alba thn.* they judged it necessary to destroy that city. Indeed, every metropolis exercised a religious supremacy over its colonics, and religion then had so great an influence that while Alba remained standing, Rome could be only a dependent city, and her progress would be for- ever arrested. After the destruction of Albn, Rome was no longer content to remain a colony, but claimed to take the rank of a metropolis, by inheriting the rights and the religious supremacy which up to that time Alba had exercised over the thirty colonies of Latium. The Ro- mans sustained long wars to obtain the presidency of the sacrifice at the ferice Latince. This was a means of acquiring the single kind of superiority and dominion, which was understood at that time. They built at home a temple to Diana; they obliged the Latins to come and offer sacrifices there, and even attracted the Sabines to it.' By this means they liabit- uated these two nations to share with then), under their presidency, the festivals, the prayers, and the sacred flesh of the victims. Rome thus united them under her re- ligious supremacy. Rome was the only city that understood how to augment her population by war. The Romans pur- sued a policy imknown to the rest of the Grasco-Italian world; they annexed all that they conquered. They brought home the inhabitants of captured cities, and gradually made Romans of them. At the same lime they sent colonists into the conquered countries, and in. ' Livy, I. 45. Dionysius, IV. 48, 49.