He usually spent the winter at his seaside villa on the Latian coast near Laurentum, and the summer at one of his country houses, either among the Tuscan hills, near Tifernum, or on the lake of Como, or at Tusculum, Tibur or Praeneste.
His successful wars with Alba, Fidenae and Veii shadow forth the earlier conquests of Latian territory and the first extension of the Roman domain beyond the walls of Rome.
The assumption that Latin was properly the language of the Latian plain and of the Plebs at Rome, which the conquering patrician nobles learnt from their subjects, and substituted for their own kindred but different Safine idiom, renders easier to understand the borrowing of a number of words into Latin from some dialect (presumably Sabine) where the velars had been labialized; for example, the very common word bos, which in pure Latin should have been *vos.
The conclusion, therefore, to which the evidence appears to lead us is that in, say, the 7th century, B.C., the Safines spoke a language not differing in any important particulars from that of the Samnites, generally known as Oscan; and that when this warlike tribe combined with the people of the Latian plain to found or fortify or enlarge the city of Rome, and at the end of the 6th century to drive out from it the Etruscans, who had in that century become its masters, they imposed upon the new community many of their own usages, especially within the sphere of politics, but in the end adopted the language of Latium henceforth known as lingua Latina, just as the Normans adopted the language of the conquered English.
Of the language spoken by the Aequi before the Roman conquest we have no record; but since the Marsi, who lived farther east, spoke in the 3rd century B.C. a dialect closely akin to Latin, and since the Hernici, their neighbours to the south-west, did the same, we have no ground for separating any of these tribes from the Latian group (see Latini).