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50 'Father' Tiber was for shipping purposes merely a creek, navigable for the small seacraft of those days, which entered thus from the coast a few miles into the midst of the plain, but that was enough to give Rome the advantage over her rivals, the towns crowning the Alban and Etruscan hills of the neighbourhood. Rome had the bridge and the inmost port just as had London.

Based on the productivity of Latium, the Romans issued from the Tiber to traffic round