Thus in so far as Greece contributed anything towards the formation of great and pacific political aggregates, she did it through attempts at federation.  But in so low a state of political development as that which prevailed throughout the Mediterranean world in pre-Christian times, the more barbarous method of conquest with incorporation was more likely to be successful on a great scale.  This was well illustrated in the history of Rome,—­a civic community of the same generic type with Sparta and Athens, but presenting specific differences of the highest importance.  The beginnings of Rome, unfortunately, are prehistoric.  I have often thought that if some beneficent fairy could grant us the power of somewhere raising the veil of oblivion which enshrouds the earliest ages of Aryan dominion in Europe, there is no place from which the historian should be more glad to see it lifted than from Rome in the centuries which saw the formation of the city, and which preceded the expulsion of the kings.  Even the legends, which were uncritically accepted from the days of Livy to those of our grandfathers, are provokingly silent upon the very points as to which we would fain get at least a hint.  This much is plain, however, that in the embryonic stage of the Roman commonwealth some obscure processes of fusion or commingling went on.  The tribal population of Rome was more heterogeneous than that of the great cities of Greece, and its earliest municipal religion seems to have been an assemblage of various tribal religions that had points of contact with other tribal religions throughout large portions of the Graeco-Italic world.  As M. de Coulanges observes,[13] Rome was almost the only city of antiquity which was not kept apart from other cities by its religion.  There was hardly a people in Greece or Italy which it was restrained from admitting to participation in its municipal rites.

However this may have been, it is certain that Rome early succeeded in freeing itself from that insuperable prejudice which elsewhere prevented the ancient city from admitting aliens to a share in its franchise.  And in this victory over primeval political ideas lay the whole secret of Rome’s mighty career.  The victory was not indeed completed until after the terrible Social War of B.C. 90, but it was begun at least four centuries earlier with the admission of the plebeians.  At the consummation of the conquest of Italy in B.C. 270 Roman burghership already extended, in varying degrees of completeness, through the greater part of Etruria and Campania, from the coast to the mountains; while all the rest of Italy was admitted to privileges for which ancient history had elsewhere furnished no precedent.  Hence the invasion of Hannibal half a century later, even with its stupendous victories of Thrasymene and Cannae, effected nothing toward detaching the Italian subjects from their allegiance to Rome; and herein we have a most instructive contrast