course of inland expansion, and such urban unity as they had possessed
was dissipated over the vast tract of territory on which the legions
were settled, or to which the noble sent his armed retainers, nominally
to keep the land as the public domain of Rome, in reality to hold it for
himself and his descendants. At a given moment (which is as clearly
marked in Roman as in Hellenic history) the possibility of such
expansion ceased, and the necessity for its cessation was as fully
exhibited in the policy of the government as in the tastes of the
people. No Latin colony had been planted later than the year 181, no
Roman colony later than 157,[3] and the senate showed no inclination to
renew schemes for the further assignment of territory amongst the
people. There were many reasons for this indifference to colonial
enterprise. In the first place, although colonisation had always been a
relief to the proletariate and one of the means regularly adopted by
those in power for assuaging its dangerous discontent, yet the
government had always regarded the social aspect of this method of
expansion as subservient to the strategic.[4] This strategic motive no
longer existed, and a short-sighted policy, which looked to the present,
not to the future, to men of the existing generation and not to their
sons, may easily have held that a colony, which was not needed for the
protection of the district in which it was settled, injuriously affected
the fighting-strength of Rome. The maritime colonies which had been
established from the end of the great Latin war down to the close of the
second struggle with Carthage claimed, at least in many cases, exemption
from military service,[5] and a tradition of this kind tends to linger
when its justification is a thing of the past. But, even if such a view
could be repudiated by the government, it was certain that the levy
became a more serious business the greater the number of communities on
which the recruiting commander had to call, and it was equally manifest
that the veteran who had just been given an allotment on which to