Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/308

 256 Outlines of European Histojy Meantime the city itself had greatly grown. The seven hills had long before been covered with buildings, and the capture of the town by the Gauls had taught the Romans to surround the place with a wall. While the wall was of massive stone, the buildings within were chiefly of wood and sun-baked brick. They were simple and unpretentious, and there was hardly a building of monumental architecture in the city. A fine paved road, leading southward to the city of Capua in the region of Naples (see map, p. 245), was the first of the famous Roman military roads, and it was called the Via Appia, after the consul Appius Claudius. Traffic with the Greek ships at the docks at length forced the Romans to begin the issue of copper coins, — " aes " they called them, — and in their bills the values of goods were given in copper coins ; hence our w^ord " estimate " (Roman " aesiv mare "). But transactions soon grew too large for such small copper change, and the government was obliged to begin the coinage of silver, with Attic weights as a basis of the different- sized coins. Money began to be a power in the city. Heretofore the interests of the farmer had been supreme, and his settlement on conquered land had dictated the govern- ment's policy of expansion. The farmer looked no further than the shores of Italy. But the transactions of the Roman mer- chant reached out beyond those shores, especially to Sicily and the south. Here he was hampered by competition from Car- thage. While his foreign interests were still small he had been willing that the Senate should make a commercial treaty with Carthage, agreeing that Rome would not intrude in Sicily, pro- vided that Carthage on her part Vv'ould keep aloof from Italy. Now, however, the Roman merchant chafed under such restric- tions ; the more so because the. Greeks of Sicily and Italy (Fig. 74 and cut, p. 166) had as usual failed to unite,^ and had 1 Such a union seemed at one time about to take place under King Pyrrhus of Epirus (on the Greek mainland), as a result of his invasion'of these regions (280 B.C.). Rome herself regarded him as dangerous to her power in Italy,