Page:A Short History of the World.djvu/188

 i68 A Short History of The World We find reading and writing becoming common and accessible accomplishments among the ruling and prosperous minority ; they were no longer the jealously guarded secret of the priests. Travel is increasing and transport growing easier by reason of horses and roads. A new and easy device to facilitate trade has been found in coined money. Let us now transfer our attention back from China in the extreme east of the old world to the western half of the Mediterranean. Here we have to note the appearance of a city which was destined to play at last a very great part indeed in hum.an affairs, Rome. Hitherto we have told very little about Italy in our story. It was before 1000 B.C. a land of mountain and forest and thinly popu- lated. Aryan-speaking tribes had pressed down this peninsula and formed little towns and cities, and the southern extremity was studded with Greek settlements. The noble ruins of Paestum preserve for us to this day something of the dignity and splendour of these early Greek establishments. A non-Aryan people, probably akin to the .^gean peoples, the Etruscans, had established themselves in the central part of the peninsula. They had reversed the usual process by subjugating various Aryan tribes. Rome when it comes into the light of history, is a little trading city at a ford on the Tiber, with a Latin-speaking population ruled over by Etruscan kings. The old chronologies gave 753 b.c. as the date of the founding of Rome, half a century later than the founding of the great Phoenician city of Carthage and twenty-three years after the first Olympiad. Etruscan tombs of a much earlier date than 753 b.c. have, however, been excavated in the Roman forum. In that red letter century the sixth century b.c, the Etruscan kings were expelled (510 B.C.) and Rome became an afistocratic republic with a lordly class of " patrician " families dominating a commonalty of " plebeians." Except that it spoke Latin it was not unlike many aristocratic Greek republics. For some centuries the internal history of Rome was the story of a long and obstinate struggle for freedom and a share in the govern- ment on the part of the plebeians. It would not be difficult to find Greek parallels to this conflict, which the Greeks would have called a conflict of aristocracy with democracy. In the end the plebeians broke down most of the exclusive barriers of the old families and established a working equality with them. They destroyed the old exclusiveness, and made it possible and acceptable for Rome to extend