The proportions in which the burgesses and Italian allies were to be drawn for military service had, as was fair, remained undefined by treaty; but, while in earlier times the two had furnished on an average equal numbers of soldiers,( 2) now, although the proportions of the population had changed probably in favour of the burgesses rather than to their disadvantage, the demands on the allies were by degrees increased disproportionately,( 3) so that on the one hand they had the chief burden of the heavier and more costly service imposed on them, and on the other hand there were two allies now regularly levied for one burgess.

In like manner with this military supremacy the civil superintendence, which (including the supreme administrative jurisdiction which could hardly be separated from it) the Roman government had always and rightly reserved to itself over the dependent Italian communities, was extended in such a way that the Italians were hardly less than the provincials abandoned without protection to the caprice of any one of the numberless Roman magistrates.

In Teanum Sidicinum, one of the most considerable of the allied towns, a consul had ordered the chief magistrate of the town to be scourged with rods at the stake in the marketplace, because, on the consul's wife expressing a desire to bathe in the men's bath, the municipal officers had not driven forth the bathers quickly enough, and the bath appeared to her not to be clean.
Similar scenes had taken place in Ferentinum, likewise a town holding the best position in law, and even in the old and important Latin colony of Cales.

In the Latin colony of Venusia a free peasant had been seized by a young Roman diplomatist not holding office but passing through the town, on account of a jest which he had allowed himself to make on the Roman's litter, had been thrown down, and whipped to death with the straps of the litter.

These occurrences are incidentally mentioned about the time of the Fregellan insurrection; it admits of no doubt that similar outrages frequently occurred, and of as little that no real satisfaction for such misdeeds could anywhere be obtained, whereas the right of appeal--not lightly violated with impunity--protected in some measure at least the life and limbs of the Roman burgess.