ProQuest Dissertations - Historia Antigua

incorporation through cult works also to meld the Latin and the Roman colonists into amore coherent whole. Indeed there is much evidence for the worship of common Latindeities in the colonies. 14V. ConclusionsThe pervading assumption that Roman colonization was controlled by a nebulous 'Rome'or by 'the senate' does not hold up in the face of the evidence for the role of the colonialcommissioners in the foundation process. Osborne defines the statist overtones ofcolonization as the notion in modern scholarship that the foundation of a colony is not thegoal, but a means to political and cultural control. 147If the Roman state or the senate as abody did want to use colonies as a way to control Italy, there would be more concreteevidence that the senate as a body mandated the political and cultural structure of everycolony; in short, that the senate deliberately acted to 'civilize' the local Italian population.Instead, the evidence we have indicates that an individual magistrate introduced a motionto found a colony, and the senate as a body merely decided whether it would be expedientfor a certain number of colonists to be sent there to form a Latin or citizen colony. Thesenate issued a consultum to this effect, which appointed a magistrate to arrange for a lawand for a commission. These consulta and the leges which arose out of them were ad hocmeasures; they did not conform to a preset model of colonization. The commissionerssometimes cooperated amongst themselves to submit their names to the presidingSee the discussions of Diana, Hercules, and Minerva in Chapter 5.Osborne (1998), pp. 251-252.143