The conquest of Greece by the Romans gave the arts, letters, and morals of the Greeks currency in the west, just as the conquest of the Persian empire by the Greeks had carried their language, customs, and religion into the Orient.

FOOTNOTES: 

[102] In almost all the Greek cities there was no middle class.  In this regard Athens with its thirteen thousand small proprietors is a remarkable exception.

[103] Polybius, v., 104.

[104] The Achaean league had illustrious leaders.  In the third century, Aratus, who for twenty-seven years (251-224) traversed Greece, expelling tyrants, recalling the rich and returning to them their property and the government; in the second century Philopoemen, who fought the tyrants of Sparta and died by poison.

[105] There were two kings of Syria by the name of Antiochus, between 193 and 169.—­ED.

[106] The decisive battle (Pydna) was fought in 168.  Perseus walked in the triumph of Paullus the next year.—­ED.

[107] The party policies of the Greeks of this period were hardly so clearly drawn as the above would seem to indicate.  Thus the Achaean League allied itself with Macedon against the AEtolians and against Sparta.  The AEtolians leagued with the Romans against Macedon.—­ED.

CHAPTER XVII

ROME

ANCIENT PEOPLES OF ITALY

THE ETRUSCANS

=Etruria.=—­The word Italy never signified for the ancients the same as for us:  the Po Valley (Piedmont and Lombardy) was a part of Gaul.  The frontier country at the north was Tuscany.  The Etruscans who dwelt there have left it their name (Tusci).

Etruria was a country at once warm and humid; the atmosphere hung heavily over the inhabitants.  The region on the shore of the sea where the Etruscans had most of their cities is the famous Maremma, a wonderfully fertile area, covered with beautiful forests, but where the water having no outlet forms marshes that poison the air.  “In the Maremma,” says an Italian proverb, “one gets rich in a year, but dies in six months.”

=The Etruscan People.=—­The Etruscans were for the ancients, and are still for us, a mysterious people.  They had no resemblance to their neighbor’s, and doubtless they came from a distance—­from Germany, Asia, or from Egypt; all these opinions have been maintained, but no one of them is demonstrated.

We are ignorant even of the language that they spoke.  Their alphabet resembles that of the Greeks, but the Etruscan inscriptions present only proper names, and these are too short to furnish a key to the language.

The Etruscans established twelve cities in Tuscany, united in a confederation, each with its own fortress, its king, and its government.  They had colonies on both coasts, twelve in Campania in the vicinity of Naples, and twelve more in the valley of the Po.