Such is a short sketch of the island of Sicily, so far as its commercial facilities and its history are concerned previously to its conquest by the Romans.  It was peculiarly valuable to them on account of its extreme fertility in corn; and by this circumstance it seems to have been distinguished in very early times; for there can be no doubt that by its being represented by the poets as the favourite residence of the goddess Ceres, the fertility of the island in corn, as well as its knowledge of agriculture, were intended to be represented.  When Gelon offered to unite with the Greeks in their war with Xerxes, one of his proposals was that he would furnish the whole Greek army with corn, during all the time of hostilities, if they would appoint him commander of their forces.  In the latter period of the Roman republic, it became their principal dependence for a regular supply of corn.

Sardinia seems to have been as little explored by and known to the ancients, as it is to the moderns.  The treaty between the Carthaginians and Romans, the year after the expulsion of the Tarquins, proves that the former nation possessed it at that time.  Calaris, the present Cagliari, was the principal town in it.  From the epithet applied to it by Horace, in one of his odes, Opima, it must have been much more fertile in former times than it is at present; and Varro expressly calls it one of the granaries of Rome.  Its air, then, as at present, was in most parts very unwholsome; and it is a remarkable circumstance that the character of the Sardi, who, after the complete reduction of the island by Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, were brought to Rome in great numbers, and sold as slaves, and who were proverbial for their worthlessness, is still to be traced in the present inhabitants; for they are represented as extremely barbarous, and so treacherous, and inhospitable, that they have been called the Malays of the Mediterranean.  The island of Corsica, which, indeed, generally followed the fate of Sardinia, was another of the fruits of the first Punic war which the Romans reaped, in some degree favourable to their commerce.  It possessed a large and convenient harbour, called Syracusium.  The Carthaginians must have reduced it at an early period, since, according to Herodotus, the Cyrnians (the ancient name for the inhabitants), were one of the nations that composed the vast army, with which they invaded Sicily in the time of Gelon.

During the interval between the first and second Punic wars, the Roman commerce seems to have been gradually, but slowly extending itself, particularly in the Adriatic:  we do not possess, however, any details on the subject, except a decisive proof of the attention and protection which the republic bestowed upon it, in repressing and punishing the piracies of the Illyrians and Istrians.  These people, who were very expert and undaunted seamen, enriched themselves and their country by seizing and plundering the merchant vessels which frequented the