It is important to indicate as definitely as possible the nature of a relation so influential.
Relation of Rome to Latium The form of the Roman hegemony over Latium was, in general, that of an alliance on equal terms between the Roman community on the one hand and the Latin confederacy on the other, establishing a perpetual peace throughout the whole domain and a perpetual league for offence and defence.

"There shall be peace between the Romans and all communities of the Latins, as long as heaven and earth endure; they shall not wage war with each other, nor call enemies into the land, nor grant passage to enemies: help shall be rendered by all in concert to any community assailed, and whatever is won in joint warfare shall be equally distributed." The stipulated equality of rights in trade and exchange, in commercial credit and in inheritance, tended, by the manifold relations of business intercourse to which it led, still further to interweave the interests of communities already connected by the ties of similar language and manners, and in this way produced an effect somewhat similar to that of the abolition of customs-restrictions in our own day.

Each community certainly retained in form its own law: down to the time of the Social war Latin law was not necessarily identical with Roman: we find, for example, that the enforcing of betrothal by action at law, which was abolished at an early period in Rome, continued to subsist in the Latin communities.

But the simple and purely national development of Latin law, and the endeavour to maintain as far as possible uniformity of rights, led at length to the result, that the law of private relations was in matter and form substantially the same throughout all Latium.

This uniformity of rights comes most distinctly into view in the rules laid down regarding the loss and recovery of freedom on the part of the individual burgess.