Page:History of Art in Sardinia, Judæa, Syria and Asia Minor Vol 1.djvu/23

Inland Tribes. cupidity, they were unmolested and not deemed worth fighting for. But the importance of possessing Sardinia was rendered evident to the Romans during the first Punic war, and at the conclusion of peace they lost no time in carrying out their scheme. 1 The subjection of the island, in which the Senate employed eight years, 235-237, was achieved by no half measures, lest the Carthaginians should find auxiliaries still armed and willing to facilitate their return and reassume the offensive. Two consuls, Pomponius Matho and Sempronius Gracchus, on their return from Sardinia, obtained the honours of a triumph. The former set bloodhounds, trained for the purpose, to track the natives out of their hiding places (Zonaras, viii. 18). But when the Romans, fifty-three years later, confined their occupation to the seaports, a general rising was the result, and Sempronius Gracchus was despatched to quell the insurrection. He it was who caused an inscription to be put up where he boasted that he had destroyed or taken 80,000 Sardinians (Livy, III. xli. 28). The work of pacification commenced by the Roman legions was finally com- pleted here, as in many other provinces under the empire, by means of roads, which ran through jungles, narrow passes, marshes, over impetuous rivers, along rocky ledges, and over the steepest declivities. Even in the time of Augustus, the mountaineers would descend to the plain to destroy the harvest and carry off the cattle ; and the Roman praetors, conscious of being inadequately supported, affected sometimes ignorance for acts of rapine which they were powerless to punish, rather than engage in a pursuit as inglorious and arduous as it was doubtful. 2 The enormous expenditure in money and men which Rome had to pay had not been attempted by the Phoenicians, satisfied with having in their own hand the control of all the maritime pathways. But the march of events 1 The thought of seizing Sardinia had suggested itself to the Romans from the day they had a navy, an idea which they carried out when they beheld Carthage wasted by the wars with the mercenaries. The cession of the island was ratified by a treaty (Polybius, I. xxiv. 7 ; I. lxxxviii. 8, 1 2 ; III. x., xxvii., xxviii.). 2 Strabo, V. ii. 7— Diodorus, who wrote about the same time, says that these tribes were still unsubdued â-^ûpmTroi 71-oÀe/ua 8wa[uvav (V. xv. 5) ; whilst Livy, relating an expedition against the Ilienses (181), the chief tribe on the eastern coast, calls them : " gens ne nunc quidam omni parte pacata " (xl. 34). It was on account of these depredations that Augustus took the island from the senate and declared it an imperial province (Dion Cassius, lxv. 25). Nor had these incursions and acts of violence discontinued under Tiberius (Tacitus, Annals, ii. 85).