It was, therefore, as a cosmopolitan, commercial city that the Romans first came into prominence. The early population was composed of mixed Etruscan and Latin stock, to which representatives of every Italian tribe and of the Greeks were soon added. By the beginning of the truly historical times the Romans had become merged into one race, representing the combined product of the races of Italy. It was this fact, very largely, which contributed to her success over the purer (ethnologically) races which surrounded her.
There were two great divisions of the melting-pot process at Rome; the first, that existing during the days of the kingdom and of the early republic; the second, that of the later republic and the empire. During the first period the process of intermixture, as has been said, was between the different races of Italy; within the second period Rome became the center of the civilized world, and her population included representatives of all the known races of mankind.
In no other despotism in the history of the world is there to be found so little racial or class distinction as in the Roman empire. Such distinctions were never able to exist at Rome during any portion of her history. The permanent privileged classes were those possessed of wealth, or of military power, and the descendants of both the conquerors and the conquered of one epoch would be found in the next indiscriminately divided among the exploiters and the exploited of the times.
The patricians, the descendants of the early settlers of Rome, were unable to maintain their special caste privileges, and were compelled to admit the plebeians to equal political rights and privileges. Class distinction remained in as marked a degree as ever at Rome, but the distinction was now between rich and poor, and the rich plebeian took equal rank with the rich patrician. Nor were the united Roman orders strong enough to preserve a monopoly of political privileges for Romans when the territory of Rome was extended over the Italian peninsula. It was found necessary to extend the franchise first to the residents of Latium and later to those of the other portions of Italy.
More remarkable still were the conditions which we find after the establishment of the empire and the extension of Roman territory around the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. There were no royal house, no hereditary nobility, and few special privileges left for the inhabitants of Rome. The distinctions between rich and poor were never more galling; _but_ high birth conferred no great advantage, and the lowest born could rise to the highest posts of honor. The ponderous weight of the empire ground out racial and caste distinctions and welded together all the heterogeneous mass. The provinces became Romanized, and the population of Rome became a mixture of all the races of the provinces. Of how little importance Rome was to the later empire is shown by the removal of the seat of the empire by Constantine to Constantinople, and the continued existence of an empire calling itself Roman for more than a thousand years after Rome had ceased to constitute a part of such empire.