The role of mid-Republican colonies in the creation of Roman Italy can hardly be overestimated. Considerations of a military-strategic nature were certainly paramount at the time of their foundation as colonies appear to have been established in newly-conquered or – in any case – highly-contested regions. But the conditions these colonies faced at the very beginning of their lives were bound to change as relevant strategic scenarios developed in largely unpredictable ways: in this sense, those factors could not but account for only one aspect – and a most transient one – of the long-term ‘mission’ of a colony. As far as Latin colonies are concerned, re-locating thousands of people in order to constitute a new polity was no small endeavour and did require both considerable resources and a proportional level of preparation and planning, let alone the time for the colony to solidly root in and begin to do without external support: that these settlements were established with a long-term purpose seems therefore hardly contentious.