*The second year of the war.* In the following year the fortune of war changed. The Romans were everywhere successful. The consul Pompeius practically pacified the north, and the _legatus_ Sulla broke the power of the allies in south Italy. A second franchise law, the _lex Plautia Papiria_, helped thin the ranks of the allies by offering Roman citizenship to all citizens of Italian federate communities who would claim it within sixty days. A third, the Pompeian Law, gave the franchise to all non-Romans in Gaul south of the Po, and Latin rights to those north of the Po river. The Senate was now anxious to bring the war to a close because affairs in the East had assumed a threatening aspect. *The end of the war and its significance.* In the course of the year 88 B. C. organized resistance among the rebels died out. The new citizens were not to be enrolled in all of the thirty-five Roman tribes, a step which might make them dominate the Assemblies, but they were to vote in certain tribes only, so that their influence could be restricted.(11) Naturally, they were dissatisfied with this arrangement and their enrollment became a burning question of Roman politics. Henceforth all Italians were Romans and in the course of the next generation the various racial elements of Italy were gradually welded into a Latin nation. As it was impossible for the magistrates of Rome to oversee the administration throughout so wide an area, the Romans organized the Italian towns into locally self-governing municipalities of the type previously established on Roman territory. At first these municipalities retained many of their ancestral laws, customs and institutions, but in time they conformed to a uniform type, the government of which was modelled upon that of the capital city Rome. The municipalities were powerful agents in the Latinization of the peninsula. VIII. THE FIRST MITHRADATIC WAR