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Excerpt from The Roman Republic, Vol. 3 of 3 The death of Sulla ushers in the final period of revolution, the period in which the Roman Republic, deprived of its master, proved that it could not do without one. That contemporaries should recognize this necessity, and tamely acquiesce in it, was of course impossible: the Roman nobles, proud of the glorious past and profiting by the imperial conditions of the present, were not the men to submit without a struggle. Nearly another half century elapsed before exhaustion and an emperor brought peace to the Roman world. At this point we may well pause for a moment and briefly review the situation with which the Roman government had to deal at home and abroad. To begin with Italy. Bit by bit the Roman franchise had been extended over all the country south of the Po, and the communities of Latins and other Italian Allies were settling down in their new capacity of municipia, towns of Roman citizens, whose members enjoyed the Roman city franchise and also a local one. Each municipality had its local senate and magistrates, who carried on the government in local affairs and exercised jurisdiction in all cases save those reserved for the higher courts in the capital. Rome was now not only the centre of empire but the capital of Italy, and with the spread of Roman law and the Latin tongue the Romanizing of the more distant parts of the peninsula went on apace. Sulla had not seen his way to annul the various extensions of the franchise, and the whole of Italy should by rights have been ere now incorporated in Rome. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imper