The freedom of the cities, whether Latin or Italian, seems to have won rigid respect from Rome and her magistrates. The burdens of military service were, indeed, unevenly distributed between the central city and her allies,[1458] while the spoils of war were mainly for the Roman. But it was a shock and a surprise when in 173 B.C. a consul made personal requisitions on the federate city of Praeneste.[1459] The lesson once learnt was only too faithfully followed, and the illegal demands of Roman officials were accompanied by acts of capricious violence.[1460] But the burden of service and the misuse of power were not the only motives urging the allies to seek the _civitas_ of Rome; nor was it merely a sentimental desire to be invested with the Roman name. The citizenship had a positive value both as a protection and a source of gain. The protection against capital or corporal penalties tacitly accorded to Romans by provincial governors could not be claimed by the allies, and, although there is no evidence that Rome, in her final organisation of the Italian confederacy, continued her early policy of inhibiting _commercium_ between the towns, yet citizenship had a commercial value. Ownership of land in the provinces was protected by the praetor and the proconsul, but only when it was held by a Roman. To the Roman trade with the barbarian was secure, to the Italian precarious; and everywhere he had to face the competition of the commercial companies of Roman knights. The grounds of interest coincided with those of sentiment in producing a demand which the progressive party amongst the Romans strove to meet. The first attempt was made through a law of the consul Flaccus in 125 B.C.,[1461] the second by one of C. Gracchus in 121, the latter law probably offering citizen rights to the Latins and Latin rights to the other allies.[1462] The final proposal of Livius Drusus in 91 was probably an unmodified extension of the _civitas_,[1463] and it was the failure of this measure that led to the Italian revolt. A new suggestion for a solution of the problem of the relations of Rome to Italy sprang from the organisation of the hostile states. A federal capital, Corfinium, now Italica, was created, and a provisional federation of eight states formed, one which was intended ultimately to embrace the whole of Italy. The Roman, or rather Italian, pattern was followed in the new constitution; it possessed two consuls, twelve praetors, and a senate of five hundred;[1464] but both the magistracies and the senate were of a federal type. The issue of the war was to determine whether Rome should remain the leading state or become a mere member of an Italian confederation, although the unlikelihood of the giant city’s settling down to this position may have appealed to some of the federal leaders.[1465] Unless a redistribution of territory and population had been effected, Rome would have been the Thebes of the