y vanquished, and as, just before, the Romans had shown
to the Hellenes in the war with the pirates the difference between a
Roman and a Greek sovereignty of the seas, so they had now brilliantly
demonstrated that Rome knew how to defend the gates of Italy against
freebooters on land otherwise than Macedonia had guarded the gates of
Greece, and that in spite of all internal quarrels Italy presented as
united a front to the national foe, as Greece exhibited distraction
and discord.

Romanization of the Entire of Italy

The boundary of the Alps was reached, in so far as the whole flat
country on the Po was either rendered subject to the Romans, or, like
the territories of the Cenomani and Veneti, was occupied by dependent
allies. It needed time, however, to reap the consequences of this
victory and to Romanize the land. In this the Romans did not adopt
a uniform mode of procedure. In the mountainous northwest of Italy
and in the more remote districts between the Alps and the Po they
tolerated, on the whole, the former inhabitants; the numerous wars,
as they are called, which were waged with the Ligurians in particular
(first in 516) appear to have been slave-hunts rather than wars, and,
often as the cantons and valleys submitted to the Romans, Roman
sovereignty in that quarter was hardly more than a name. The
expedition to Istria also (533) appears not to have aimed at much
more than the destruction of the last lurking-places of the Adriatic
pirates, and the establishment of a communication by land along the
coast between the Italian conquests of Rome and her acquisitions on
the other shore. On the other hand the Celts in the districts south
of the Po were doomed irretrievably to destruction; for, owing to
the looseness of the ties connecting the Celtic nation, none of the
northern Celtic cantons took part with their Italian kinsmen except
for money, and the Romans looked on the latter not only as their
national foes, but as the usurpers of their natural heritage. The
extensive assignations of land in 522 had already filled the whole
territory between Ancona and Ariminum with Roman colonists, who
settled here without communal organization in market-villages and
hamlets. Further measures of the same character were taken, and
it was not difficult to dislodge and extirpate a half-barbarous
population like the Celtic, only partially following agriculture,
and destitute of walled towns. The great northern highway, wh