The Historians' History of the World 05

Nevertheless this rolling back of the tide of aggression, and the return of the legions of the republic to the limits of her former conquests, had no effect in healing the internal sickness of which the irritation of the provinces was only symptomatic. The triumph of her arms and the sense of security it engendered only served to redouble her oppressions and to aggravate the misery of her subjects. The course of events will lead us on some future occasion to trace the remains of resentment and hatred towards Rome, which lingered long in some regions of Italy itself: but for the most part the Italians were now satisfied; they were content to regard the city of Romulus as their own metropolis; and while they enjoyed the fruits of her wide-wasting domination, gradually learned to take a pride in her name. But beyond the Ionian and the Tyrrhenian seas the same ardent vows were formed for enfranchisement which had precipitated upon Rome the Marsians and the Samnites; in more than one quarter the old struggle of the Social Wars was about to be renewed on wider and more distant theatres: but the elements of strife were now more complicated than before; the parties engaged were more thoroughly alien from each other; the hostility of Rome’s new enemies was the more inveterate as they had less sympathy with her institutions, and were ambitious of overthrowing rather than of sharing them. The second period of the civil wars of Rome opens with the revolt of the Iberians in the west, and the maritime devastations of the pirates in the east.

THE ROMAN PROVINCES

Italia, the region to which the privileges of the city had been conceded by the Plautian law, was bounded, as we have seen, by a line drawn across the neck of the peninsula from the Rubicon on the Adriatic, to the Isère on the Tyrrhenian Sea. To the north and south lay two provinces which held the first rank in political importance: on the one hand Gallia, or Gaul within the Alps; on the other the island of Sicily. The Gaulish province was divided into two districts by the Padus, or the Po, from whence they derived their denominations respectively, according as they lay within or beyond that river.

But the whole of this rich and extensive territory was placed under the command of a single proconsul, and the citizens soon learned to regard with jealousy a military force which menaced their own liberties at the same time that it maintained the obedience of their subjects. Sicily, on the other hand, though tranquil and generally contented, and requiring but a slender force to control it, was important to the republic from the abundance of its harvests, to which the city could most confidently look for its necessary supplies of grain. Next among the provinces in proximity to Rome were the islands of Sardinia and Corsica, of which the former also furnished Italy with grain; but both were rudely and imperfectly cultivated, and the unhealthiness of the larger island especially continued to keep it below many far remoter regions in wealth, population, and intelligence. The first province the Romans had acquired beyond their own seas was Spain, where their arms had made slow but steady progress from the period of their earliest contests with the Carthaginians, although the legions had never yet penetrated into its wildest and most distant fastnesses. The connection between Rome and her Iberian dependencies was long maintained principally by sea, while the wide territory intervening between the Alps and Pyrenees was still occupied by numerous free and jealous communities. But in the course of the last half-century the republic had acquired the command of the coast of the Gulf of Lyons; her roads were prolonged from Ariminum to Barcino and Valentia, while the communications of her armies were maintained by numerous fortified positions in the Further Gaul, and a secure and wealthy province extending from the Var to the Garonne.