This Rome of the insurgents was distinguished--not to its advantage--from the original Rome merely by the circumstance, that, while the latter had at any rate an urban development, and its unnatural position intermediate between a city and a state had formed itself at least in a natural way, the new Italia was nothing at all but a place of congress for the insurgents, and it was by a pure fiction of law that the inhabitants of the peninsula were stamped as burgesses of this new capital.

But it is significant that in this case, where the sudden amalgamation of a number of isolated cantons into a new political unity might have so naturally suggested the idea of a representative constitution in the modern sense, no trace of any such idea occurs; in fact the very opposite course was followed,( 12) and the communal organization was simply reproduced in a far more absurd manner than before.

Nowhere perhaps is it so clearly apparent as in this instance, that in the view of antiquity a free constitution was inseparable from the appearance of the sovereign people in person in the primary assemblies, or from a city; and that the great fundamental idea of the modern republican-constitutional state, viz.

the expression of the sovereignty of the people by a representative assembly--an idea without which a free state would be a chaos--is wholly modern.

Even the Italian polity, although in its somewhat representative senates and in the diminished importance of the comitia it approximated to a free state, never was able in the case either of Rome or of Italia to cross the boundary-line.
Warlike Preparations Thus began, a few months after the death of Drusus, in the winter of 663-4, the struggle--as one of the coins of the insurgents represents it--of the Sabellian ox against the Roman she-wolf.