OF THE CONQUEST

=War.=--There was at Rome a temple consecrated to the god Janus whose
gates remained open while the Roman people continued at war. For the
five hundred years of the republic this temple was closed but once
and that for only a few years. Rome, then, lived in a state of war. As
it had the strongest army of the time, it finished by conquering all
the other peoples and by overcoming the ancient world.

=Conquest of Italy.=--Rome began by subjecting her neighbors, the
Latins, first, then the little peoples of the south, the Volscians,
the AEquians, the Hernicans, later the Etruscans and the Samnites, and
finally the Greek cities. This was the hardest and slowest of their
conquests: beginning with the time of the kings, it did not terminate
until 266, after four centuries of strife.[124]

The Romans had to fight against peoples of the same race as
themselves, as vigorous and as brave as they. Some who were not
content to obey they exterminated. The rich plains of the Volscians
became a swampy wilderness, uninhabitable even to the present time,
the gloomy region of the Pontine marshes.

In the land of the Samnites there were still recognizable, three
hundred years after the war, the forty-five camps of Decius and the
eighty-six of Fabius, less apparent by the traces of their
intrenchments than by the solitude of the neighborhood.

=The Punic Wars.=--Come into Sicily, Rome antagonized Carthage. Then
began the Punic wars (that is to say, against the Phoenicians). There
were three of these wars. The first, from 264 to 241, was determined
by naval battles; Rome became mistress of Sicily. It was related that
Rome had never had any war-ships, that she took as a model a
Carthaginian galley cast ashore by accident on her coast and began by
exercising her oarsmen in rowing on the land. This legend is without
foundation for the Roman navy had long endured. This is the Roman
account of this war: the Roman consul Duillius had vanquished the
Carthaginian fleet at Mylae (260); a Roman army had disembarked in
Africa under the lead of Regulus, had been attacked and destroyed
(255); Regulus was sent as a prisoner to Rome to conclude a peace, but
persuading the Senate to reject it, he returned to Carthage where he
perished by torture. The war was concentrated in Sicily where the
Carthaginian fleet, at first victorious at Drepana, was defeated at
the AEgates Islands; Hamilcar, besieged on Mount Eryx, signed the
peace.