the attempts of the annalists to reconstruct the traditional number of thirty Latin cities; there may still have been thirty votes, but these may well have been distributed in some way over the forty-seven cities of the league. That the closing of the Latin confederacy was due mainly to Roman pressure is perhaps shown by the series of dangerous revolts amongst its cities, which often sided with their ancient enemies the Volsci. The Hernicans were as eager to shake off the yoke; but Rome emerged from both crises with her power strengthened and her commonwealth enlarged. The latter result was due to a renewed employment of her old device of absorption. Tusculum in 381, and Satricum not long afterwards, had their commonwealths destroyed, and were forced, as a penal measure, to accept the full or partial Roman citizenship.[1409] At the close of the struggle in 358 the leagues were renewed and the relations of Rome with the two groups of states remodelled, probably on harder terms. In the Samnite war which followed, the Latin cities first clung to Rome, for they preferred a native to a Sabellian hegemony; but Rome’s rapid conclusion of a treaty of peace and alliance with the Samnites, which the league was asked to accept and not to ratify, was taken as the final proof of actual subjection concealed under the name of a hegemony. The Latins made their last demands; they gave up their position as a military confederacy, but they did not wish to be absorbed into the body politic of Rome. They asked for the golden mean—a system of federal government, but one that should still preserve the fundamental distinction between Rome and the confederate cities. One of the consuls was to be a Roman, the other a Latin, and half the Senate was to be chosen from Latium. But the civic feeling was too strong at Rome; she would not herself surrender the communal constitution which she had so often wrested from others; she rejected the alternative which would have paralysed her power as a conquering state and made of her but a federal capital. Her “No!” to the Latins was one of the turning-points in the history of Italy and of the world.