Vespasian, whose seizure of the imperial purple we noticed a moment ago, was not a native of the city of Rome, as all the members of the Julian line had been, nor did he belong to a noble family. These two facts might almost be taken as an omen of the great change which he and his successors were to bring about in the position of Rome and Italy in the Roman world and in the political standing of the senate. The exceptional position which Rome and Italy had held under the republic was taken from them in part by robbing them of their privileges and in part by raising the provinces to a higher political plane. Augustus had started the new movement by stationing troops in Italy and by taking the municipal departments in Rome under his control. Within a century the same fate befell other Italian municipalities which had befallen Rome, and they had to surrender to the emperor the control of their finances and their jurisdiction in all important civil and criminal cases. The privilege which at first Rome and later the Italian municipalities guarded most jealously was their exclusive right to Roman and Latin citizenship. Claudius turned from this tradition when he granted these privileges to certain Gallic cities, and the Flavian emperors violated it in a still more striking way by their generous treatment of many cities in Spain. The levelling down of Italy to the position of the provinces, so far as citizenship was concerned, was completed when Caracalla in 212 granted Roman citizenship to practically all freemen in the empire.[10] In this connection may be mentioned a significant change which was made in the organization of the army. The legions from the time of Hadrian on were recruited in all parts of the empire, and officers were no longer drawn solely from the Western and Latin-speaking portion of the Roman world, but from the East also. The army therefore ceased to be the great Romanizing influence which it had been in the past, and what was still worse, a feeling of local solidarity grew up which was destined in the end to be fatal to the unity of the empire. It was this feeling which gave rise to the nationalist movement in the third century, and the Gallic kingdom of Postumus in the West in that century and the kingdom of Zenobia in Palmyra in the East were concrete manifestations of this feeling and at the same time premonitions of the future dissolution of the empire.