Meanwhile, in the western portion of the civilised world a similar process had gone on.  In the Italian peninsula the usual struggle had gone on between the various tribes inhabiting it.  The fertile plain of Lombardy was not in those days regarded as belonging to Italy, but was known as Cisalpine Gaul.  The south of Italy, as we have seen, was mainly inhabited by Greek colonists, and was called Great Greece.  Between these tracts of country the Italian territory was inhabited by three sets of federate tribes—­the Etrurians, the Samnites, and the Latins.  During the 230 years between 510 B.C. and 280 B.C.  Rome was occupied in obtaining the supremacy among these three sets of tribes, and by the latter date may be regarded as having consolidated Central Italy into an Italian federation, centralised at Rome.  At the latter date, the Greek king Pyrrhus of Epirus, attempted to arouse the Greek colonies in Southern Italy against the growing power of Rome; but his interference only resulted in extending the Roman dominion down to the heel and big toe of Italy.

If Rome was to advance farther, Sicily would be the next step, and just at that moment Sicily was being threatened by the other great power of the West—­Carthage.  Carthage was the most important of the colonies founded by the Phoenicians (probably in the ninth century B.C.), and pursued in the Western Mediterranean the policy of establishing trading stations along the coast, which had distinguished the Phoenicians from their first appearance in history.  They seized all the islands in that division of the sea, or at any rate prevented any other nation from settling in Corsica, Sardinia, and the Balearic Isles.  In particular Carthage took possession of the western part of Sicily, which had been settled by sister Phoenician colonies.  While Rome did everything in its power to consolidate its conquests by admitting the other Italians to some share in the central government, Carthage only regarded its foreign possessions as so many openings for trade.  In fact, it dealt with the western littoral of the Mediterranean something like the East India Company treated the coast of Hindostan:  it established factories at convenient spots.  But just as the East India Company found it necessary to conquer the neighbouring territory in order to secure peaceful trade, so Carthage extended its conquests all down the western coast of Africa and the south-east part of Spain, while Rome was extending into Italy.  To continue our conchological analogy, by the time of the first Punic War Rome and Carthage had each expanded into a shell, and between the two intervened the eastern section of the island of Sicily.  As the result of this, Rome became master of Sicily, and then the final struggle took place with Hannibal in the second Punic War, which resulted in Rome becoming possessed of Spain and Carthage.  By the year 200 B.C.  Rome was practically master of the Western Mediterranean, though it took another century to consolidate its