Wars between the Sabellians and Tarentines.

Archidamus.

Alexander the Molosian.

While the Romans were fighting on the Liris and Volturnus, other conflicts agitated the south-east of the peninsula. The wealthy merchant-republic of Tarentum, daily exposed to more serious peril from the Lucanian and Messapian bands, and justly distrusting its own sword, gained by good words and better coin the help of condottieri from the mothercountry. The Spartan king, Archidamus, who with a strong band had come to the assistance of his fellow-Dorians, succumbed to the Lucanians on the same day on which Philip conquered at Chseronea (416); a retribution, in the belief of the pious Greeks, for the share which, nineteen years previously, he and his people had taken in pillaging the sanctuary of Delphi. His place was taken by an abler commander, Alexander the Molossian, brother of Olympias the mother of Alexander the Great. In addition to the troops which he had brought along with him, he united under his banner the contingents of the Greek cities, especially those of the Tarentines and Metapontines; the Poediculi (around Eubi, now Euvo), who, like the Greeks, found themselves in danger from the Sabellian nation; and lastly, even Lucanian exiles themselves, whose considerable numbers point to the existence of violent internal disorganization in that confederacy. Thus he soon found himself superior to the enemy. Consentia (Cosenza), which seems to have been the federal headquarters of the Sabellians settled in Magna Grsecia, fell into his hands. In vain the Samnites came to the help of the Lucanians; Alexander defeated their combined forces near Pæstum.

Umbro-Sabellian migration.

The migration of the Umbrian stocks appears to have begun at a period later than that of the Latins. Like the Latin, it moved in a southerly direction, but it kept more in the centre of the peninsula, and towards the east coast. It is painful to speak of it; for our information regarding it comes to us like the sound of bells from a town that has been sunken in the sea. The Umbrian people extended, according to Herodotus, as far as the Alps, and it is not improbable that in very ancient times they occupied the whole of Northern Italy, to the point where the settlements of the Illyrian stocks began on the east, and those of the Ligurians on the west. As to the latter, there are traditions of their contests with the Umbrians, and we may perhaps draw an inference as to their extension in very early times towards the south from isolated Dames, such as that of the island of Ilva (Elba) compared with the Ligurian Ilvates. To this period of Umbrian greatness the evidently Italian names of the most ancient settlements in the valley of the Po, Hatria (black-town), and Spina (thorn town), probably owe their origin, as well as -the numerous traces of Umbrians in Southern Etruria (such as the river Umbro, Camars the old name of Clusium, Castrum Amerinum). Such indications of an Italian population having preceded the Etruscan especially occur in the most southern portion of Etruria, the district between the Ciminian forest (below Viterbo) and the Tiber.

Amalgamation of the Palatine and Quirinal cities.

The history of every nation, and Italian history especially, is a Synoikismos on a great scale. Rome, in the earliest form in which we have any knowledge of it, was already triune, and similar incorporations only ceased when the spirit of Roman vigour had wholly died away. Apart from that primitive process of amalgamation of the Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres, of which hardly anything beyond the bare fact is known, the earliest act of incorporation of this sort was that by which the Hill-burgesses became merged in the Palatine Eome. The organization of the two communities, when they were about to be amalgamated, may be conceived to have been substantially similar, and in solving the problem of union they would have to choose between the alternatives of retaining duplicate institutions or of abolishing one set of these and extending the other to the whole united community. They adopted the former course in the case of all sanctuaries and priesthoods. Thenceforth the Roman community had its two guilds of Salii and two of Luperci, and as it had two forms of Mars, it had also two priests for that divinity; the Palatine priest, who afterwards usually took the designation of priest of Mars, and the Oolline, who was termed priest of Quirinus. It is likely, although it can no longer be proved, that all the old Latin priesthoods of Eome, the Augurs, Pontiffs, Vestals, and Eetials, originated in the same way from the combined colleges of priests of the Palatine and Quirinal communities.

The hegemony of Rome over Latium shaken and re-established.

The great achievement of the regal period was the establish- of the sovereignty of Rome over Latium, under the form of hegemony. It is in the nature of the case evident that the change in the constitution of Rome could not but powerfully affect both the relation of the Roman state towards. Latium, and the internal organization of the Latin Wished, communities themselves; and that it did so is obvious from tradition. The fluctuations which the revolution; in Rome occasioned in the Romano-Latin confederacy are attested by the legend, unusually vivid and various in its hues, of the victory at the Lake Regillus, which the dictator or consul, Aulus Postumius (255? 258?) is said to have gained over the Latins with the help of the Dioscuri, and still more definitely by the renewal of the perpetual league between Rome and Latium by Spurius Cassius in his second consulate (261). These narratives, however, give us no in- formation as to the main matter, the legal relation between the new Roman republic and the Latin confederacy; and what from other sources we learn regarding that relation comes to us without date, and can only be inserted here with an approximation to probability.

Original equality of rights between Rome and Latium.

The nature of a hegemony implies that it becomes gradually converted into sovereignty by the mere inward force of circumstances; and the Roman hegemony over Latium formed no exception to the rule.

Dr. Theodor Mommsen's researches into the languages, laws, and institutions of ancient Rome and Italy are now so well known and appreciated by the best scholars of this country, that it may seem presumptuous on my part to step forward for the purpose of introducing his work on Roman history to the English public. I should indeed have been glad to leave this duty to others, or have allowed the book to take its own chance, feeling quite sure that no words of mine are likely to attract readers, and that the work itself, in its English garb, will become as popular in this country as it is in the land of its birth. But several years ago, I was applied to by more than one enthusiastic admirer of Dr. Mommsen in Germany to do something towards making his History of Rome known in this country, and a repeated perusal of the German original led me to the conviction that its author richly deserved the admiration of his countrymen. I accordingly felt it both a duty and a pleasure, some years back, to prevail upon my friend, Mr. George Robertson, to give to the public at least a specimen of the book, in an English translation of the first, or introductory chapters, on the early inhabitants of Italy—a subject on which no man is better entitled to be listened to with respect and attention than Dr. Mommsen. The specimen which was then published would, I hoped, create a desire for the whole work, and in this hope I have not been disappointed.

The crisis

The aim of Hannibal in his expedition to Italy had been to break up the Italian confederacy: after three campaigns that aim had been attained, so far as it was at all attainable. It was clear that the Greek and Latin or Latinized communities of Italy, since they had not been shaken in their allegiance by the day of Cannæ, would not yield to terror, but only to force; and the desperate courage with which even in southern Italy isolated little country towns, such as the Bruttian Petelia. conducted their forlorn defence against the Phoenicians, showed very plainly what awaited them among the Marsians and Latins. If Hannibal had expected to accomplish greater results in this direction and to lead even the Latins against Rome, these hopes had proved vain. But it appears as if even in other respects the Italian coalition had by no means produced the results which Hannibal hoped for. Capua had at once stipulated that Hannibal should not have the right to call Campanian citizens compulsorily to arms; the citizens had not forgotten how Pyrrhus had acted in Tarentum, and they foolishly imagined that they should be able to withdraw at once from the Roman and from the Phoenician rule. Samnium and Luceria were no longer what they had been, when King Pyrrhus had thought of marching into Rome at the head of the Sabellian youth.

Union of the plebeians.

The tribunician movement appears to have mainly originated in social rather than political discontent, and there is good reason to suppose that some of the wealthy plebeians admitted to the senate were no less opposed to that movement than the patricians. For they shared in the privileges against which the movement was mainly directed; and although in other respects they found themselves treated as inferior, it probably seemed to them by no means an appropriate time for asserting their claim to participate in the magistracies, when the exclusive financial power of the whole senate was assailed. This explains why during the first fifty years of the republic no step was taken aiming directly at the political equalization of the orders.

But this league between the patricians and wealthy plebeians by no means bore within it any security for its permanence. Beyond doubt from the very first some of the leading plebeian families had attached themselves to the movement-party, partly from a sense of what was due to the fellow-members of their order, partly in consequence of the natural bond which unites all who are treated as inferior, and partly because they perceived that concessions to the multitude were inevitable in the issue, and that, if turned to due account, they would result in the abrogation of the exclusive rights of the patriciate, and would thereby give to the plebeian aristocracy the decisive preponderance in the state.

[The views embodied in the text at pages 292 et seq., regarding the political position of Appius the Decemvir have been abandoned by Dr. Mommsen, since the preparation of his third edition, in favour of those which he has briefly in. dicated in the note at page 292, and which are fully illustrated in the subjoined disquisition read by him at the sitting of the Academy on the 4th March, 1861. I have given it almost entire.—TR.]

The patrician clan of the Claudii played a leading part in the history of Rome for some five hundred years. Our object in this inquiry is to make some contribution towards a proper estimate of its political position.

We are accustomed to regard this Claudiau gens as the very incarnation of the patriciate, and its leaders as the champions of the aristocratic party and the conservatives in opposition to the plebeians and the democrats; and this view, in fact, already pervades the works which form our authorities. In the little, indeed, which we possess belonging to the period of the republic, and particularly in the numerous writings of Cicero, there occurs no hint of the kind; for the circumstance, that Cicero in one special instance (ad Fam. iii. 7, 5), when treating of the persons of Appius and Lentulus, uses Appietas and Lentulitas—as what they were—superlative types of the Roman nobility, by no means falls under this category. It is in Livy that we first meet with the view which is now current.

Antiochus the Great

In the kingdom of Asia the diadem of the Seleucidse had been, worn since 531 by king Antiochus the Third, the great-great-grandson of the founder of the dynasty. He had, like Philip, begun to reign at nineteen years of age, and had displayed sufficient energy and enterprise, especially in his first campaigns in the East, to warrant his being without ludicrous impropriety addressed in courtly style as “the Great.” He had succeeded—more, however, through the negligence of his opponents and of the Egyptian Philopator in particular, than through any ability of his own—in restoring in some degree the integrity of the monarchy, and in reuniting with his crown, first, the eastern satrapies of Media and Parthyene, and then the separate state which Achseus had founded on this side of the Taurus in Asia Minor. A first attempt to wrest from the Egyptians the coast of Syria, the loss of which he sorely felt, had, in the year of the battle of the Trasimene Lake, met with a bloody repulse from Philopator at Eaphia; and Antiochus had taken good care not to resume the contest with Egypt, so long as a man—even though he were but an indolent one—occupied the Egyptian throne. But, after Philopator's death (549), the right moment for crushing Egypt appeared 205. to have arrived; and with that view Antiochus entered into concert with Philip, and had thrown himself upon CœleSyria while Philip attacked the cities of Asia Minor.