=Colonies and Military Roads.=—­In the countries that were still only partially subject, Rome established a small garrison.  This body of soldiers founded a town which served as a fortress, and around about it the lands were cut into small domains and distributed to the soldiers.  This is what they called a Colony.  The colonists continued to be Roman citizens and obeyed all commands from Rome.  Quite different from a Greek colony which emancipated itself even to the point of making war on its mother city, the Roman colony remained a docile daughter.  It was only a Roman garrison posted in the midst of the enemy.  Almost all these military posts were in Italy, but there were others besides; Narbonne and Lyons were once Roman colonies.

To hold these places and to send their armies to a distance the Romans built military roads.  These were causeways constructed in a straight line, of limestone, stone, and sand.  The Romans covered their empire with them.  In a land like France there is no part where one does not find traces of the Roman roads.

CHARACTER OF THE CONQUEST

=War.=—­There was at Rome a temple consecrated to the god Janus whose gates remained open while the Roman people continued at war.  For the five hundred years of the republic this temple was closed but once and that for only a few years.  Rome, then, lived in a state of war.  As it had the strongest army of the time, it finished by conquering all the other peoples and by overcoming the ancient world.

=Conquest of Italy.=—­Rome began by subjecting her neighbors, the Latins, first, then the little peoples of the south, the Volscians, the AEquians, the Hernicans, later the Etruscans and the Samnites, and finally the Greek cities.  This was the hardest and slowest of their conquests:  beginning with the time of the kings, it did not terminate until 266, after four centuries of strife.[124]

The Romans had to fight against peoples of the same race as themselves, as vigorous and as brave as they.  Some who were not content to obey they exterminated.  The rich plains of the Volscians became a swampy wilderness, uninhabitable even to the present time, the gloomy region of the Pontine marshes.

In the land of the Samnites there were still recognizable, three hundred years after the war, the forty-five camps of Decius and the eighty-six of Fabius, less apparent by the traces of their intrenchments than by the solitude of the neighborhood.

=The Punic Wars.=—­Come into Sicily, Rome antagonized Carthage.  Then began the Punic wars (that is to say, against the Phoenicians).  There were three of these wars.  The first, from 264 to 241, was determined by naval battles; Rome became mistress of Sicily.  It was related that Rome had never had any war-ships, that she took as a model a Carthaginian galley cast ashore by accident on her coast and began by exercising her oarsmen in rowing