Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/500

472 Rome the mistress of the world. Their conquest by the Gauls was altogether different.

In B.C. 396 the Gauls poured through the passes north of Lugano into the Valley of the Ticino, defeated the Etruskans in a pitched battle, burnt Melpum, and, being joined by other bodies of their countrymen, took possession of Lombardy, from that time forward known to the Romans as Gallia. Six years later they defeated the Romans in the battle of the Allia, sacked Rome, and were only kept on the north-eastern side of the Apennines by the ceaseless vigilance of the Romans.

This invasion of Lombardy by the Gauls broke up the trade-routes of the Etruskans. Hatria was destroyed, and a new Hatria established, probably by the survivors, on the shores of Picenum, which afterwards became a Greek city, the modern Atri. The condition of the Etruskans in Rhætia and the surrounding districts, cut off from Etruria by the hostile barrier of Gauls, was probably analogous to that of the Britons cut off by the Gothic invasion from the Roman Empire. Their arts and civilisation declined, although they preserved their speech as late as the days of Livy. The Etruskan influence on the north, which had lasted for many centuries, came to an end in the fourth century B.C., and trade did not find its way again along the old channels until the conquest of Cis-Alpine Gaul by the Romans and the spread of the Roman power to the north.

The interruption of this traffic led to the development of new channels, by which the influence of Greece penetrated into the countries of the north.