Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/338

314 with the hardy stocks of the interior of the peninsula. While his successors were fighting amongst themselves, and wasting the strength of Greece by the loss of one mercenary army after another, Rome was conquering and organising all Italy, and wresting from Carthage the empire of the Western Mediterranean. During the age of the struggles and intrigues of the Achæan League, she was going through her mortal conflict with Hannibal, in the course of which she acquired a Spanish dominion, and from which she rose more formidable than ever, to attack and ruin the Macedonian power itself. Greece then passed under her protection, and before long was united with Macedonia as a Roman province. The Greek king of Pergamus bequeathed his kingdom to her; the one Greek City-State which still retained a real independence and prosperity, the city and island of Rhodes, was her firm friend and ally. Greek historians, and especially the cosmopolitan Polybius, began to recognise a new order of things in the world, and like Virgil a century later, and Dante in the Middle Ages, looked upon Rome, as destined from her foundation to be the mistress of a mighty empire. By the end of the second century B.C. that empire included every valuable region of the Mediterranean except Egypt, and a century later it stretched from the Euphrates to the Atlantic.

And yet, during almost the whole of this period, Rome continued to be in some sense a City-State, and what is more, for some time at least believed herself to be maintaining the free city-life of her