CHAP. XVI.

THE ROMAN COLONY.

125

to the swarms of overflowing population which the states of Greece from time to time sent forth from the parent city, as a complete representation, on a small scale, of the social and religious body from which they emanated, but bound to it in the land of their adoption by no political tie. The so-called colonies of the modern states of Europe have borne even less connection with their parents than this, and have been generally merely casual combinations of restless individuals fleeing from inconveniences felt or imagined in the old country to the expected abundance of new untrodden regions, and bartering perhaps their commercial freedom for the military protection of the parent state. But the Romans planted their colonies with a settled purpose, and that purpose was the acquisition of political strength. With that view they selected the most appropriate sites in a newly conquered territory, some city strong in its position or its defences, or important from its geographical relations; they expelled from it the whole or a portion of its inhabitants, and replaced them with a band of Roman citizens, armed and equipped for military possession, to be encamped as it were in a fixed military station. They assigned to these colonists a sufficient portion of the conquered lands, allowed or required them to transplant with them their wives and children, their slaves and dependents, and to establish a local government after the Roman model, with all the social and religious appliances of the metropolis. Thus transferred to a distant locality, the colonist did not cease to be still a Roman; he did not forfeit his franchise with the right of suffrage, of commerce, and of marriage; but the first he could seldom exercise, the others perhaps not at

Yet, in view of the enjoyment of these fancied privileges, he bound himself to partake in the defence of Rome and of her interests, and to regard himself as her soldier placed in garrison on her frontier. Each colony became a lesser Rome militant in foreign lands. It had its complete organization after the pattern of the city, its two ruling magistrates, who acted as its consuls with the name of duumvirs, its decurions who constituted its Senate, and other corresponding officers. It had its own military chest and its own force of armed citizens. The numbers drafted into these provincial Romes varied to the greatest extent. Beneventum, the point where the roads into Campania and Apulia diverged, received, it is said, a colony of 6000. Luceria, which occupied the spot where met the territories of Apulia, Lucania, and Samnium, was occupied by 14,000. We read, indeed, of a colony of as many as 20,000. The number of colonies thus planted throughout Italy during a period of seventy years was not less than twenty. During that period, it will be remembered, the Roman population was drained by a series of most bloody

wars. The total number of citizens at the end of the war of Pyrrhus hardly reached 290,000, and it is difficult to believe in an enumeration which would leave hardly one half of this aggregate for the residents at Rome itself and in the districts immediately surrounding it. We must suppose at least that the colonies did not, for the most part, tax her resources in proportion to the great strongholds above mentioned.

A glance, however, at the places in which Rome thus fortified herself against the foes on her frontier will show how important was the part they played in maintaining the obedience of Italy, and in leavening her population with the ideas and usages, and even the blood of the conquering race. In the North the colonies of Sutrium and Nepe guarded the passes of the Ciminian forest, and kept the Etruscans in subjection. The Rutulians, the nearest neighbors, and among the earliest opponents of Rome, were controlled by Ardea and Satricum. In the country of the Volscians were planted Antium on the coast, Norba, Velitræ, and Setia among the hills; to which may be added Fregellæ, Sora, and Interamna. Campania received colonies at Cales, Suessa, Aurunca, and Sinuessa. Atina, Aquinum, and Casinum were posted in the mountains. To these might be added other central stations: Æsula and Carscoli among the Equians, and Narnia, which covered the route from Umbria towards Rome, and had often admitted the descent of the Gauls from beyond the Apennines. At a still farther distance lay Adria, Firmum, and Castrum, in the Picentine territory; Sena and Ariminum, on the coast of the Upper Sea; Brundusium, the port of traject from Bruttium to Epirus; while Tarentum, Locri, and Rhegium were held as military stations by the soldiers of the republic. These and other well-guarded fortresses covered Rome with a double or triple line of defences, and supplied her with outposts for the base of her offensive operations in every quarter.

To bind these outposts together, and connect them with Rome as their common base, a system of roads was devised which forms one of the most characteristic features of the Roman policy. It was in the midst of the great struggle with Samnium that Appius the censor constructed the way called after his name, which formed a causeway direct from the gates of the city to Capua. This road was actually built with large square stones laid upon a raised platform of sand and mortar, and trenched on both sides. Upon such a pavement the legions could march, with all their baggage and implements of warfare, with equal speed and certainty in all weathers and at all seasons. The roads themselves were almost indestructible. Some remains of the Way of Appius, not the substruction only, but portions of the outer stonework, are still sub

CHAP. XVII.

ROME AND CARTHAGE.

127

sisting at certain points at the present day. This was the first work of its kind, but it was the precursor of many thousands of miles of similar roadway with which the great Roman Empire became eventually penetrated in every direction. At a later period, but rapidly from year to year, the plan of the censor Appius was carried out on other lines by other projectors, each of whom was proud to give his own name to the work he had executed. Within a space of about fifty years the Valerian Way was laid down to Corfinium, the Aurelian skirted the coast of Etruria, the Flaminian penetrated the Apennines to Ariminum, and the Æmilian continued this line to Placentia. Each of these roads bore the legions by the shortest route from Rome to the various colonies at a distance, but it was the object of their builders to establish direct communication from the centre to the extremities, and the cross lines that led transversely from one distant outpost to another were fewer in number and less elaborately constructed. Rome continued to the last to be jealous of encouraging any independent combinations among the various communities of her empire.

CHAPTER XVII.

Rome brought face to face with Carthage.—The Greek historian, Polybius, and the early Roman annalists. From this period the history of Rome rests upon a generally secure basis.

FOR a space of more than a hundred years the conquest of the Western world was held in debate between the Romans and the Carthaginians. The progress of Carthage towards universal dominion in the West had hitherto met with few and brief checks, and might well be regarded as irresistible. The fate of many generations of the human race in the seats of its highest moral advance and material culture depended upon the result of the struggle that was about to commence, which forms on this account, as well as from many of the details of its progress, one of the most interesting portions of human history.

We are in a position to appreciate the consequences for good and for evil of the success of Rome over her rival, while we can hardly conjecture the effects which would have followed had the event been contrary. It is idle to compare the wars of Carthage against Rome with those of Persia under Xerxes against Greece, or of the Saracens, at a much later period, against the feeble remnant of the Romanized Moors. It is idle to characterize the

Punic wars as a struggle of the Shemitic peoples against the Cauca sians. We will indulge in no such wide speculations as these. Carthage, as is well known, was an offshoot from Tyre, the great commercial emporium of the Eastern world, and was founded by Phoenician colonists, imbued no doubt with the political and religious sentiments of the Syrian race from which they sprung. But this filiation dated from a remote antiquity. Though the story of Dido, endeared to us by Virgil, is an anachronism of some hundreds of years, there is no doubt that the foundation of Carthage was as early as that of Rome, and the connection between her and the parent state, never very intimate, had long ceased to have any political significance whatever. It was said, indeed, that when Xerxes enrolled the navies. of Tyre in his expedition against Greece, he had required or solicited the aid of Carthage as a Tyrian offshoot; but the Carthaginians had made light of the summons, and easily evaded the obligation he would have imposed upon them. Carthage, moreover, was but one, and the youngest, of a number of Tyrian colonies that fringed the long coast-line of Northern Africa, none of which had acknowledged the duty of taking up arms in concert with their almost forgotten metropolis.

Accordingly, Carthage must be regarded as a perfectly independent state, attached by no special sympathies to the East. She had established an empire of her own, and an empire of a peculiar character. Her superior political aptitude had enabled her to subject to her immediate sway a considerable tract of territory to the right and left, and as far as human cultivation could extend at her back; but her chief resources were derived from the indefatigable spirit of commercial adventure with which she had formed relations with every place of trade on almost all the coasts of the Mediterranean. The objects of exchange of the ancient world were far more limited in number than ours, growing as they did almost entirely within the narrow zone of a few degrees of latitude bounded north and south by the opposite coasts of that great inland lake; but within this sphere there was much activity at work. The sea was the free highway of a hundred millions of people who had little interior communication by roads, and who were kept apart from one another by innumerable political restrictions. The Carthaginians made themselves the common carriers of this vast population. It should have been, and for the most part it really was, their policy to keep themselves free from political complications with any other people. With the Greeks, the Phoenicians, the Egyptians, their relations were strictly commer cial; with the Romans they made treaties of commerce on the principle of political non-interference; it was not till they were

CHAP. XVII. FIRST RIVALRY OF ROME AND CARTHAGE. 129

tempted by the wealth and feebleness of the coasts of Sicily that they began to entertain thoughts of establishing a foreign empire. The Carthaginians had planted their emporia of trade on the coasts of Northern Africa, of Spain, of Sardinia and Corsica. They traded with the Phocæans of Massilia, and through them with the teeming population of Transalpine Gaul. They worked the iron mines of Ilva, the silver mines of the Balearic Isles, and the gold mines of Spain. They traded with the Britons for tin, and with the Frisians and the Cimbri for amber. Wherever they found it necessary to protect their establishments with arms they erected fortresses and planted garrisons. So far they met with little resistance, and the people themselves among whom they settled were easily induced to enlist in their armies for pay. The forces which Carthage could wield consisted of Libyans and Moors from Africa, of Spaniards, of Gauls, of Greeks, and even of Italians. Trained under her own officers, chosen from the ranks of a proud and wealthy aristocracy, these hired soldiers were formed into hardy and disciplined warriors, and the ample and unfailing stipends they received kept them faithful to their chiefs and their standards. Their comfort was consulted by the politic measure of enlisting the men together with their wives and families, by which the mercenaries were attached permanently to the service for which they had once contracted, and, when sent on foreign adventure, left always hostages behind them. The stern constitution of the Carthaginian polity was itself an element of strength. The traditions of the state suffered little innovation. An ancient oligarchy bore sway, and the foundations on which it was fixed had proved for ages immovable.

The attempt of the Carthaginians to possess themselves of the Greek colonies on the coast of Sicily was the first false step which led eventually to their ruin. Already Rome and Carthage had long watched each other with jealousy. Each perhaps was afraid to make a stroke which might draw down upon it the resentment of the other. The attack of Pyrrhus upon the Romans seemed to offer their rivals a favorable opportunity. But when the Car thaginians moved against Sicily, Pyrrhus was well content to evacuate the continent and fling himself into the island as the protector of the Sicilians against them. They succeeded, indeed, in baffling him, and after passing backwards and forwards between the two scenes of warfare, he had finally withdrawn from the defence of the Grecian communities against either the one enemy or the other. But Carthage had given proof of her ambition, and Rome was on the alert to arrest her schemes, and present herself as the defender of the victims she had prematurely menaced. Before entering upon the particulars of the great struggle be