# CHAPTER 3 — Rome Became a Great City by Destroying the Surrounding Cities and by Freely Receiving Foreigners into Its Ranks

‘A result of the fall of Alba was an increase in the size of Rome.’ * Those who design a city to create a great empire must strive with great diligence to fill it full of inhabitants, because without this abundance of men it will never succeed in becoming a great city. This may be done in two ways: either through love or through force. It is done through love by keeping the pathways open and safe for foreigners who wish to come there to live, so that everyone may live there willingly; it is done through force, after nearby cities are destroyed, by sending their inhabitants to live in your city. This method was so strictly observed by Rome that in the era of its sixth king, * 80,000 men capable of bearing arms lived in Rome, for the Romans wished to act like good farmers who, in order to make a plant grow and produce mature fruit, prune off the first branches it puts out, so that the sap * remaining in the root of the plant will cause it to grow greener and bear more fruit with the passage of time. That this means of enlarging a city and creating an empire is both good and necessary may be demonstrated by the examples of Sparta and Athens, two extremely well-armed republics organized by the best laws, which none the less never brought them to match the grandeur of the Roman empire; and Rome seemed far more disorderly and much less well organized than these republics. No other reason can be cited for this than the one presented above: Rome, having enlarged its population through those two methods, was already capable of putting 80,000 armed men in the field, while Sparta and Athens never surpassed a total of 20,000 each. This situation arose not because Rome had a more advantageous location than these two cities, but only because of a different mode of conduct. Lycurgus, the founder of the Spartan republic, believing that nothing was more likely to corrupt his laws than the admixture of new inhabitants, did everything to prevent outsiders from having any contact with Sparta, and besides preventing intermarriage and the exchange of civilities or other types of social intercourse that bring people together, he ordered that in his republic people should use only leather money * so that nobody might be tempted to come there to carry on commerce or to practise any other kind of craft or trade, with the result that the city was never able to enlarge its population. Since all our actions imitate nature, it is not possible nor natural for a slender trunk to support heavy branches. Thus, a small republic cannot occupy cities or kingdoms that are stronger or larger than it is; and if, nevertheless, it does occupy them, such a republic will experience the same fate as the tree whose branches are larger than its trunk, which, sustaining its branches with difficulty, will be bent by every little breeze that blows. This situation is seen to have come about in Sparta after it had occupied all the cities of Greece, for no sooner did Thebes rebel than all the other cities rebelled as well, and the trunk remained alone without any branches. The same thing could not happen to Rome, since its trunk was so large that it could easily support any branch. Thus this mode of conducting affairs, together with the others that will be described below, made Rome great and extremely powerful. Livy demonstrates this in a few words when he says: ‘A result of the fall of Alba was an increase in the size of Rome.’ *