Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/507

 CHAP. n. THE ROMAN CONQUEST. 501 immutable limits "which the kings had traced for it, and which the ceremony of the Ambarvalia sanctified every year. What increased with every conquest was the dominion of Rome (^imperium Homanum). So long as the republic lasted, it never entered the mind of any one that the Romans and the other peo- ples could form a single nation. Rome might, indeed, receive a few of the conquered, allow them to live within her walls, and transform them, in the course of time, into Romans ; but she could not assimilate a whole foreign people to her people, an entire territory to her territory. Still this was not peculiar to the policy of Rome, but a principle that held through all antiquity ; it was a principle irom which Rome would sooner have departed than any other city, but from which she could not entirely free herselfl Whenever, therefore, a people was conquered, it did not enter the Roman state; it entered only the Roman dominion. It was not united to Rome, as provinces are to-day united to a capital ; between other nations and itself Rome knew only two kinds ot connection — subjection or alliance. From this it would seem that municipal institutions must have subsisted among the conquered, and that the world must have been an assemblage of cities distinct Irom each other, and having at their head a ruling city. But it was nothing of the kind. The effect of tho Roman conquest was to work in every city a complete transformation. On one side were the subjects dedititii, or those who, having pronounced the formula of the deditiOy had delivered to the Roman people "their persons, their walls, their lands, their waters, their houses, their temples, and their gods."