Rome Became a Great City by Ruining the Surrounding Cities and Admitting Foreigners Easily to Her Honors

Crescit interea Roma Albae ruinis. [Rome grew on the ruins of Alba] Those who plan for a City to achieve great Empire ought with all industry to endeavor to make it full of inhabitants, for without this abundance of men, one can never succeed in making a City great. This is done in two ways, by love and by force. Through love, by keeping the ways open and secure for foreigners who should plan to come to live there. Through force, by destroying the neighboring Cities and sending their inhabitants to live in your City. Which was so greatly observed by Rome, that in the time of the sixth King of Rome, that there lived there eighty thousand men capable of bearing arms. For the Romans wanted to act according to the custom of the good cultivator, who, in order to make a plant grow and able to produce and mature its fruits, cuts off the first branches that it puts out, so that by retaining that virtu in the roots of that plant, they can in time grow more green and more fruitful. And that this method of aggrandizing and creating an Empire was necessary and good, is shown by the example of Sparta and Athens; which two Republics although well armed and regulated by excellent laws, none the less did not attain to the greatness of the Roman Empire, and Rome appeared more tumultuous and not as well regulated as those others. No other reason can be adduced for this than that mentioned above; for Rome, from having enlarged the population of the City in both those two ways, was enabled to put two hundred thousand men under arms, while Sparta and Athens were never able [............