s never been a good one, it is the only
port which can be said to command an entrance into the centre of the
peninsula.

No one, however, would contend that the position of Rome is an ideal
one. Taken in and by itself, without reference to Italy and the
Mediterranean, that position has little to recommend it. It is too far
from the sea, nearly twenty miles up the valley of a river with an
inconveniently rapid current, to be a great commercial or industrial
centre; and such a centre Rome has never really been in the whole
course of her history. There are no great natural sources of wealth in
the neighbourhood--no mines like those at Laurium in Attica, no vast
expanse of corn-growing country like that of Carthage. The river too
was liable to flood, as it still is, and a familiar ode of Horace
tells us how in the time of Augustus the water reached even to the
heart of the city.[9] Lastly, the site has never really been a healthy
one, especially during the months of July and August,[10] which are
the most deadly throughout the basin of the Mediterranean. Pestilences
were common at Rome in her early history, and have left their mark in
the calendar of her religious festivals; for example, the Apolline
games were instituted during the Hannibalic war as the result of a
pestilence, and fixed for the unhealthy month of July. Foreigners from
the north of Europe have always been liable to fever at Rome; invaders
from the north have never been able to withstand the climate for long;
in the Middle Ages one German army after another melted away under her
walls, and left her mysteriously victorious.

There are some signs that the Romans themselves had occasional
misgivings about the excellence of their site. There was a tradition,
that after the burning of the city by the Gauls, it was proposed that
the people should desert the site and migrate to Veii, the conquered
Etruscan city to the north, and that it needed all the eloquence of
Camillus to dissuade them. It has given Livy[11] the opportunity of
putting into the orator's mouth a splendid encomium on the city and
its site; but no such story could well have found a place in Roman
annals if the Capitol had been as deeply set in the hearts of the
people as was the Acropolis in the hearts of the Athenians. At a later
time of deep depression Horace[12] could fancifully suggest that the
Romans should leave their ancient home like the Phocaeans of old, and
seek a new one in the islands