Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/79

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 63

everything that concerns these latter the situation was from that which it had been before the foundation, by a band of adven- turers and of colonists, of a petty center as jealously closed as was primitive Rome! Then the Etruscans, separated from other populations by physical frontiers and by their ethnic traits, stretched from the Adige and the Alps to the Tiber. The center and the Mediterranean slope were inhabited by homogeneous tribes Umbrians, Sabians, etc. sometimes united and some- times at war with each other. The Oscans formed a barrier across the peninsula from one sea to the other. The Oenotrians dominated down to the Sicilian strait. On the north of the Adige there were, besides the Veneti, and on the south of Mount Garganus, the lapygi, an Illyrian people.

What a change if we place ourselves a few years before our era, under the empire! All the barriers and the ethnic and physical divisions are leveled. The whole peninsula bears the name of Italy, reserved in primitive times for the populations inhabiting Bruttium and Lucania. In reality, then, the name has no longer any ethnic or geographic significance.

Without speaking of Gaul, to which we shall later give atten- tion in connection with the formation and development of the French nation, and of its successive frontiers and the conquest by Caesar, Egypt, and then Galatia and Paphlagonia, were annexed about thirty years before our era. Even these annexa- tions were brought about peacefully, inasmuch as they were only the transformation of earlier protectorates. At the beginning of the first century the empire is bounded on the north by the Rhine, the Danube, and the Euxine ; on the east, by the Euphrates and the mountains of Syria and Judea ; on the eastern side of the Mediterranean it stretched on the south to Egypt and to the southern shores of the great sea. It occupied these coasts as far as Mauritania. On the east it reached the ocean and the North Sea. The Mediterranean had thus become an internal waterway.

The principal purpose of Augustus had been to assure the defense of Gaul against the Germans, as that of Caesar had been to guarantee Italy against invasions from the Gauls. Both were agents of that destiny which decreed that purely physical obstacles