ee that it was founded by the Greeks. Cato
in his _Fragment_, and Dionysius Halicarnassus in the first book of his
_History_, affirm that the founders were the Pisi Alfei Pelasgi, who had
for their captain the King Pelops, as Pliny says in his _Natural
History_ (lib. 5), and Solinus too, as though it were indubitable: who
does not know that Pisa was from Pelops?" Certainly Pisa is very old,
and whether or no King Pelops, as Pliny thought, founded the city, the
Romans thought her as old as Troy. In 225 B.C. she was an Etruscan city,
and the friend of Rome; in Strabo's day she was but two miles from
the sea; Caesar's time she became a Roman military station; while in 4
A.D. we read that the disturbances at the elections were so serious that
she was left without magistrates. That fact in itself seems to bring the
city before our eyes: it is so strangely characteristic of her later
history.

[Illustration: PISA

_Alinari_]

But in spite of her enormous antiquity, there are very few left of her
Etruscan and Roman days, the remains of some Roman Thermae, Bagni di
Nerone near the Porta Lucca being, indeed, all that we may claim, save
the urns and sarcophagi scattered in the Campo Santo, from the great
days of Rome. The glory of Pisa is the end of the Middle Age and the
early dawn of the Renaissance. There, amid all the hurly-burly and
terror of invasion and civil wars, she shines like a beacon beside the
sea, proud, brave, and full of hope, almost the only city not altogether
enslaved in a country in the grip of the barbarian, almost overwhelmed
by the Lombards. And indeed, she was one of the first cities of Italy to
fling off the Lombard yoke. Favoured by her position on the shores of
the Tyrrhenian Sea, yet not so near the coast as to invite piracy, she
waged incessant war on Greek and Saracen. Lombardy, heavy with conquest,
fearful for her prize, which was Italy, was compelled to encourage the
growth of the naval cities. It was on the sea that the future of Pisa
lay, like the glory of the sun that in its splendour and pride passes
away too soon.

Already in the ninth century we hear of her prowess at Salerno, while in
the tenth, having possessed herself of her own government under consuls,
she sent a fleet to help the Emperor Otho II in Sicily. Fighting without
respite or rest, continually victorious, never downhearted, she had
opened the weary story of the civil strife of Italy with a war against
Lucca, in the year 10