those fortified outposts scattered around the hostile lands of the south and west of Italy, were designed precisely to hold those lands under Roman control. However, the populations of these colonies had large numbers of peregrini – foreigners living within the city walls. And many of the ‘Romans’ in these colonies had never even seen Rome but were closely linked to neighbouring Italian cities through marriage, commerce and culture. So whether the Latins would stay loyal was already an open question, but it was a particularly moot question in the case of those colonies with a population of
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