There never would be safety in it for refugees; you would not find in it a great diversity of races living apart; conquerors and conquered would quickly homogenize,—­unless the conquerors had their main seat in, and remained in political union with, transalpine realms.  Refugees would still and always have to move on, if they desired to keep their freedom.  Three ways would be open to them, and three destinies, according to which way they chose.  They might go down into the long strip of Adriatic coastland, where there are no natural harbors—­and remain isolated and unimportant between the mountain barrier and the sea.  Those who occupied this cul de sac have played no great part in history:  the isolated never do.—­Or they might cross the Apennines and pour down into the lowlands of Etruria and Latium, where are rich lands, some harbors, and generally, fine opportunities for building up a civilization.  Draw-backs also, for a defeated remnant:  Etruria is not too far from Lombardy to tempt adventurers from the north, the vanguard of the conquering people;—­although again, the Apennine barrier might make their hold on that middle region precarious.  They might come there conquering; but would form, probably, no very permanent part of the northern empire:  they would mix with the conquered, and at any weakening northward, the mixture would be likely to break away.  So Austria had influence and suzerainty and various crown appanages in Tuscany; but not such settled sway as over the Lombard Plain.  Then, too, this is a region that, in a time of West Asian manvantara and European pralaya, might easily tempt adventurers from the Near East.

But the main road for true refugees is the high Apennines; and this is the road most of them traveled.  Their fate, taking it, would be to be pressed southward along the backbone of Italy by new waves and waves of peoples; and among the wild valleys to lose their culture, and become highlandmen, bandit tribes and raiding clans; until the first comers of them had been driven down right into the hot coastlands of the heel and toe of Italy.  Great material civilizations rarely originate among mountains:  outwardly because of the difficulty of communications; inwardly, I suspect, because mountain influences pull too much away from material things.  Nature made the mountains, you may say, for the special purpose of regenerating effete remnants of civilizations.  Sabellians and Oscans, Samnites and Volscians and Aequians and dear knows what all:—­open your Roman Histories, and in each one of the host of nation-names you find there, you may probably see the relic of some kingdom once great and flourishing north or south of the Alps;—­just as you can in the Serbians, Roumanians, Bulgars, Vlachs, and Albanians in the next peninsula now.