What archaeology digs up in the colonies is material remains, brute facts, but what it infers is men; men marching out in serried ranks under their standards for the formal act of founding (_deductio_); Romans and local Italians living side by side with some degree of amity and equality; Romans impressing their ways and speech on the peoples round about; Roman slum-dwellers given a new chance in the new territory; large estates broken up to give land to the landless; grizzled veterans settled in the quiet countryside after a lifetime of hard campaigning; Romans homesick in strange places; undergoing the rigors of frontier existence; subject to the ferment of success and failure; forging a cultural life (the epic poet Ennius, the dramatist Pacuvius, the satirist Lucilius, all came from Roman colonies). The grid plans, in town and country, as Bradford has pointed out, show, if not genius, then strong determination and great powers of organization. The grids are, like the Romans themselves, methodical, self-assured, technically competent. They are also regimented, arbitrary, doctrinaire, and opportunist. This was the price the Mediterranean world had to pay for the security of the Roman peace. But before that peace-without-freedom could be enjoyed, the Roman Republic was to suffer its death throes. That blood-bath was the work of the nabobs of the last century before Christ, who left their stamp, as nabobs will, on the buildings they erected to testify to their glory. 5 Nabobs as Builders: Sulla, Pompey, Caesar The aftermath of Sulla’s second march on Rome in 83 B.C. was a spate of political murders and confiscations. The profits were enormous, and Sulla used them for the most ambitious building program in the history of the Republic. His motive was in part the desire to rival what he had seen in the cities of the Greek East, in part his understanding that massive building projects are the outward and visible sign of princely power. And so he monumentalized the same Forum in which he displayed the severed heads of his enemies, planning, in the Tabularium, or Records Office, a theatrical backdrop for the tragedy which in the ensuing years was to be played below. He settled 100,000 of his veterans in colonies in central and south Italy. He built or reinforced walls in Rome, Ostia, and Alba Fucens; theaters in Pompeii, Alba, Bovianum Vetus, and Faesulae; he built temples in Tibur, Cora, Tarracina, Pompeii and Paestum. And this is only a sample of his prodigious building activity. But by all odds the most grandiose of his completed projects took shape at Praeneste (nowadays Palestrina), a little over twenty miles east of Rome, where he sacked the town to punish it for taking the side of his enemy Marius. He then built or restored there the great, axially-symmetrical, terraced Sanctuary of Fortune, the most splendid monument in Italy of the Roman Republic.