by the last wars from the list of political powers.  Rome received, as it were, an official recognition of its new position by means of the two solemn embassies, which in 481 were sent from Alexandria to Rome and from Rome to Alexandria, and which, though primarily they regulated only commercial relations, beyond doubt prepared the way for a political alliance.  As Carthage was contending with the Egyptian government regarding Cyrene and was soon to contend with that of Rome regarding Sicily, so Macedonia was contending with the former for the predominant influence in Greece, with the latter proximately for the dominion of the Adriatic coasts.  The new struggles, which were preparing on all sides, could not but influence each other, and Rome, as mistress of Italy, could not fail to be drawn into the wide arena which the victories and projects of Alexander the Great had marked out as the field of conflict for his successors.

Notes for Book II Chapter VII

1.  The story that the Romans also sent envoys to Alexander at Babylon on the testimony of Clitarchus (Plin.  Hist.  Nat. iii. 5, 57), from whom the other authorities who mention this fact (Aristus and Asclepiades, ap.  Arrian, vii. 15, 5; Memnon, c. 25) doubtless derived it.  Clitarchus certainly was contemporary with these events; nevertheless, his Life of Alexander was decidedly a historical romance rather than a history; and, looking to the silence of the trustworthy biographers (Arrian, l. c.; Liv. ix. 18) and the utterly romantic details of the account—­which represents the Romans, for instance, as delivering to Alexander a chaplet of gold, and the latter as prophesying the future greatness of Rome—­we cannot but set down this story as one of the many embellishments which Clitarchus introduced into the history.

2.  II.  VI.  Last Struggles of Samnium

3.  Near the modern Anglona; not to be confounded with the better known town of the same name in the district of Cosenza.

4.  These numbers appear credible.  The Roman account assigns, probably in dead and wounded, 15,000 to each side; a later one even specifies 5000 as dead on the Roman, and 20,000 on the Greek side.  These accounts may be mentioned here for the purpose of exhibiting, in one of the few instances where it is possible to check the statement, the untrustworthiness—­almost without exception—­of the reports of numbers, which are swelled by the unscrupulous invention of the annalists with avalanche-like rapidity.

5.  The later Romans, and the moderns following them, give a version of the league, as if the Romans had designedly avoided accepting the Carthaginian help in Italy.  This would have been irrational, and the facts pronounce against it.  The circumstance that Mago did not land at Ostia is to be explained not by any such foresight, but simply by the fact that Latium was not at all threatened by Pyrrhus and so did not need Carthaginian aid; and the Carthaginians certainly fought for Rome in front of Rhegium.