Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/171

Rh din its inland districts in times quite historical. se settlements were probably indirect results of the time dominion of the Etruscans in the Campanian seas, and of their rivalry with the Cumieans at Vesuvius.

The Etruscans however by no means confined themselves to robbery and pillage. The peaceful intercourse which they held with Greek towns is attested by the gold and silver coins which, from the year, were struck by the Etruscan cities, and in particular by Populonia, after a Greek model and a Greek standard. The circumstance, moreover, that these coins are modelled not upon those of Magna Græcia, but rather upon those of Attica and of Asia Minor, is perhaps an indication of the hostile attitude in which the a stood towards the Italian Greeks. For commerce in fact enjoyed a most favourable position, far more advantageous than that of the inhabitants of Latium. Inhabiting the country from sea to sea, they commanded the great Italian free ports on the western waters, the mouths of the Po and the Venice of that time on the eastern sea, and the land route which from ancient times led from Pisæ on the Tyrrhene Sea to Spina on the Adriatic, while in the south of Italy they commanded the rich plains of Capua and Nola. They were the holders of the most important articles of Italian export, the iron of Æthalia, the copper of Volaterræ and Campania, the silver of Populonia, and the amber which was brought to them from the Baltic (P. 135). Under the protection of their privateering, which constituted as it were a rude navigation act, their own commerce could not fail to flourish. It need not surprise us to find Etruscan and Milesian merchants competing in the market of Sybaris, nor need we be astonished to learn that the combination of privateering and commerce on a great scale generated an unbounded and infatuated luxury, in which the vigour of Etruria early wasted away.

While in Italy the Etruscans and, in a lesser degree, the Latins thus stood opposed to the Hellenes, warding them off and partly treating them as enemies, their antagonism of necessity affected to some extent the rivalry which then pervaded the commerce and navigation of the Mediterranean, the rivalry between the Phœnicians and Hellenes. This is not the place to set forth in detail how, during the regal period of Rome, these two great nations contended for supremacy on all the shores of the Mediterranean, in Greece even