The time-expired soldiers were treated--not altogether unreasonably--as surplus population, and they were planted out in large bodies, sometimes in existing towns which needed population or at least a loyal population, sometimes in new towns established full-grown for the purpose.

This method of dealing with discharged soldiers was continued during the early Empire, though it was then employed somewhat intermittently and the 'coloniae' were oftener planted in the provinces than in Italy itself; indeed the establishment of Italian 'coloniae', as distinct from grants of colonial rank by way of honour, almost ceased after A.D.

68.
It is not easy to determine the number of such new foundations of towns in Italy.

Some seventy or eighty are recorded from the early and middle periods of the Republic--previous to about 120 B.C.; Sulla added a dozen or so; Octavian (Augustus) in his earlier years established or helped to establish about thirty.[57] But these figures can hardly represent the whole facts.

The one certainty is that, through the causes just detailed, a very large number of the Italian towns were either founded full-grown or re-founded under new conditions during the later Roman Republic and the earlier Empire.