Rome’s famed technique of ‘divide and conquer’ continued to hold down Italy even after most of that peninsula had in fact been conquered. Individual Italians who reached a certain status within a community might individually aspire to the citizenship that Rome denied to their fellow burghers, and individual communities competed with one another for the Latin Right, or simply for Roman patrons among the aristocracy. Among the Italians mutual incomprehension of each other’s language and culture, together with rivalry for Roman favour prevented them from working together, and the Romans smugly
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