ITALIAN TOWN-PLANNING: THE LATE REPUBLIC AND EARLY EMPIRE During the later Republic and the earlier Empire many Italian towns were founded or re-founded.

To this result several causes contributed.
Like the Greeks before them, the Romans of the Republic sent out from time to time compact bodies of emigrants whenever the home population had grown too large for its narrow space.

These bodies were each large enough to form a small town, and thus each migration meant--or might mean--the foundation of a new town full-grown from its birth.

The Greeks generally established new and politically independent towns.
The Romans followed another method.

Their colonists remained subject to Rome and constituted new centres of Roman rule, small quasi-fortresses of Roman dominion in outlying lands.