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, which had been, probably some eighty years earlier, carried by way of Otricoli to Narni, and had shortly before been prolonged to the newly-founded fortress of Spoletium (514), was now (534) carried, under the name of the “Flaminian” road, by way of the newly-established market-village Forum Flaminii (near Foligno), through the pass of Furlo to the coast, and thence along the latter from Fanum (Fano) to Ariminum; it was the first artificial road which crossed the Apennines and connected the two Italian seas.  Great zeal was manifested in covering the newly-acquired fertile territory with Roman townships.  Already, to cover the passage of the Po, the strong fortress of Placentia (Piacenza) had been founded on the right bank; not far from it Cremona had been laid out on the left bank, and the building of the walls of Mutina (Modena), in the territory taken away from the Boii, had far advanced —­already preparations were being made for further assignations of land and for continuing the highway, when sudden event interrupted the Romans in reaping the fruit of their successes.

Notes for Chapter iii

1.  III.  II.  Evacuation of Africa

2.  That the cession of the islands lying between Sicily and Italy, which the peace of 513 prescribed to the Carthaginians, did not include the cession of Sardinia is a settled point (iii.  II.  Remarks On the Roman Conduct of the War); but the statement, that the Romans made that a pretext for their occupation of the island three years after the peace, is ill attested.  Had they done so, they would merely have added a diplomatic folly to the political effrontery.

3.  III.  II.  The War on the Coasts of Sicily and Sardinia

4.  III.  VIII.  Changes in Procedure

5.  II.  I. Restrictions on the Delegation of Powers

6.  That this was the case may be gathered partly from the appearance of the “Siculi” against Marcellus (Liv. xxvi. 26, seq.), partly from the “conjoint petitions of all the Sicilian communities” (Cicero, Verr. ii. 42, 102; 45, 114; 50, 146; iii. 88, 204), partly from well-known analogies (Marquardt, Handb. iii. i, 267).  Because there was no -commercium- between the different towns, it by no means follows that there was no -concilium-.