disappeared not much less rapidly and totally from the ranks of the Italian nations.  On the other hand, other accounts suggest the derivation of those Boii on the Neusiedler See from the main stock of the nation, which formerly had its seat in Bavaria and Bohemia before Germanic tribes pushed it towards the south.  But it is altogether very doubtful whether the Boii, whom we find near Bordeaux, on the Po, and in Bohemia, were really scattered branches of one stock, or whether this is not an instance of mere similarity of name.  The hypothesis of Strabo may have rested on nothing else than an inference from the similarity of name—­an inference such as the ancients drew, often without due reason, in the case of the Cimbri, Veneti, and others.

2.  III.  I. Libyphoenicians

3.  III.  Vi.  Gades Becomes Roman

4.  Of this praetor there has recently come to light the following decree on a copper tablet found in the neighbourhood of Gibraltar and now preserved in the Paris Museum:  “L.  Aimilius, son of Lucius, Imperator, has ordained that the slaves of the Hastenses [of Hasta regia, not far from Jerez de la Frontera], who dwell in the tower of Lascuta [known by means of coins and Plin. iii. i, 15, but uncertain as to site] should be free.  The ground and the township, of which they are at the time in possession, they shall continue to possess and hold, so long as it shall please the people and senate of the Romans.  Done in camp on 12 Jan. [564 or 565].” (-L.  Aimilius L. f. inpeirator decreivit utei qui Hastensium servei in turri Lascutana habitarent, leiberei essent, Agrum oppidumqu[e], guod ea tempestate posedissent, item possidere habereque ioussit, dum poplus senatusque Romanus vettet.  Act. in castreis a. d.  XII. k.  Febr.-) This is the oldest Roman document which we possess in the original, drawn up three years earlier than the well-known edict of the consuls of the year 568 in the affair of the Bacchanalia.

5. 1 Maccab. viii. 3.  “And Judas heard what the Romans had done to the land of Hispania to become masters of the silver and gold mines there.”

CHAPTER VIII

The Eastern States and the Second Macedonian War

The Hellenic East

The work, which Alexander king of Macedonia had begun a century before the Romans acquired their first footing in the territory which he had called his own, had in the course of time—­while adhering substantially to the great fundamental idea of Hellenizing the east —­changed and expanded into the construction of a system of Hellene-Asiatic states.  The unconquerable propensity of the Greeks for migration and colonizing, which had formerly carried their traders to Massilia and Cyrene, to the Nile and to the Black Sea, now firmly held what the king had won; and under the protection of the -sarissae-, Greek civilization peacefully domiciled itself everywhere throughout the ancient empire of the Achaemenidae.  The officers, who divided the heritage of the great general, gradually settled their differences, and a system of equilibrium was established, of which the very Oscillations manifest some sort of regularity.