It allured provincials themselves to adopt Roman civilization by granting the franchise and other privileges to those who conformed.

Neither step need be ascribed to any idealism on the part of the rulers.

_Coloniae_ served as instruments of repression as well as of culture, at least in the first century of the Empire.

When Cicero[2] describes a _colonia_, founded under the Republic in southern Gaul, as 'a watch-tower of the Roman people and an outpost planted to confront the Gaulish tribes', he states an aspect of such a town which obtained during the earlier Empire no less than in the Republican age.
Civilized men, again, are always more easily ruled than savages.[3] But the result was in any case the same.

The provincials became Romanized.
[Footnote 1: English writers sometimes adduce the provincial origins of the soldiers as proofs that they were unromanized.