Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/257

been achieved by no Greek city — neither by Athens nor Sparta. From every disaster, like England in the eighteenth century, she rose with renewed strength to fresh expansion. The Latins of the Campagna lost their ancient equality with her, and had to become Roman citizens, for the most part on an inferior scale of privilege. The dwellers on the hills round about Latium had already submitted to her; and by the year 290 B.C. the Sabine populations of central Italy, the hardiest of all Italians, had ceased to struggle against the inevitable. The Etruscans to the north were less stubborn, and Rome already dominated the peninsula. In 281 B.C. Pyrrhus of Epirus seemed likely for a time to put an end to her career; but Rome at last forced him to depart, and all Italy acknowledged her as mistress. Next came the collision with Carthage, and the long struggle in Sicily ending in the acquisition of new provinces of government beyond the sea; and then more conquest to the north, among the Gauls of the great plain of the Po. Again for fourteen years she struggled for life with Carthage, when Hannibal brought his army to her very gates, and stripped her for the time of almost all the dominion she had won. But even such a war as this only ended in a fresh series of conquests; Carthage made humiliating terms, and lost all her dominion in Spain. Hannibal, intriguing as a last resource with the Macedonian king, turned Rome's attention eastwards, and in the course of another half-century both Macedonia and Greece were under the rule of Roman magistrates.