Italy; Cn. Pompeius Strabo, the father of Magnus, gave the status of a Latin colonia to those communities in the Po valley and
Liguria which were not already either Roman or Latin. Full Roman citizenship was delayed for more than a generation, but "was
granted by Caesar.
I have already drawn attention to the spread of the urban model in Italy. But what happened after the enfranchisement of Italy was
of a rather different kind. Amidst all our ignorance, it is clear that new Roman communities were equipped with relatively
homogeneous constitutions, appropriate to urban societies. Rome in fact found it difficult to think other than in terms of urban
centres when dealing with other communities. The enfranchisement of Italy thus provided, with the creation of new Roman
communities, a powerful spur to the development of urban centres. This in itself is likely to have been in turn a factor making for
the Romanization of Italy.
There are at least two levels at which the phenomenon of Romanization needs to be considered. It is probably easiest to begin with
the level of the elite. The Roman system had always been characterized by a relatively high degree of elite mobility. It was
naturally rare for a man, none of whose family had ever held office, to reach the consulship, as did C. Marius and Cicero. But the
ascent of a family to the consulship over several generations was a common enough phenomenon; and a man who ennobled himself
and his descendants by being the first of his family to achieve the consulship or other high office was known as a novus homo, new
man. Families from newly enfranchised communities, throughout the history of the republic, waited perhaps for a generation and
could then begin their ascent to high office. The story was no different with the mass enfranchisement of Italy after 91-89; by the
time of Augustus, the Roman Senate was full of members of the elites of recently enfranchised communities, many of whose
descendants went on to hold the consulship. The avenues of advancement were those which had always applied, friendship with
those already in positions of power, wealth, oratorical skill, military expertise (see Ch. 20 for Italian authors of the late Republic).
Much more difficult to assess is the Romanization of the population of Italy as a whole; we must admit that we can know nothing of
the culture of an illiterate farm labourer, too poor even to be drafted into the armies of Rome. All our knowledge relates, if not to
the elite, at least to those close to it. Given this limitation, there are four indicators worth considering of the survival or
submergence of distinctive local cultures in Italy: language, religious practices, family structures, and funeral rites. The last, if
valid, is particularly useful, since there is substantial archaeological evidence.
The evidence of language is striking. Northern Etruria remained substantially untouched by Roman influence down to 91. It is also
an area where inscriptions in Latin down to the same date are conspicuous by their absence. In the generation after Sulla, however,
bilingual inscriptions make their appearance, and within the lifetime of Cicero Etruscan had virtually disappeared. The case of
Samnium is harder to assess, since the destruction wrought by Sulla in 82-81 means that there was little in the way of urban life till
Caesar. Inscriptions in the local language, one of the varieties of what is known to modern scholars as Oscan, certainly disappear;
but the argument from silence is dangerous. Further south in Lucania, however, the same pattern occurs, without any reason to
suppose that Sulla was responsible; and indeed inscriptions in Oscan are here replaced by inscriptions in Latin. It is worth citing the
evidence provided by the recent excavations at Rossano di Vaglio; here a rural Lucanian sanctuary was absorbed after Sulla into the
administrative structures of the near-by city of Potentia.
The evidence for religious practices and family structures is exiguous; what there is suggests that during the lifetime of Cicero
traces of religious diversity, such as different local calendars, disappeared and rules governing marriage and inheritance became
steadily more uniform. The evidence relating to funerary practices is substantial, and is spread throughout Italy; it consistently
portrays the replacement of distinctive local practices, often of great antiquity, by a relatively uniform set of customs. There
remained, of course, enormous variety according to the wealth of the deceased, but that is another matter.