. Rome : its rise and fall ; a text-book for high schools and colleges. ately has its historybeen connected with that of the peninsula. In ancienttimes it was the meeting-place and battle-ground of theCarthaginians, Greeks, and Romans. This island had some such influence upon Roman historyas the islands of the ^Egean Sea exerted upon the historyof Greece. As the islands which stud that sea were, ineffect, stepping-stones that drew the inhabitants of conti-nental Greece to the shores of Asia Minor and thus made 1 During the Middle Ages this name was transferred to the south-western part of Ital
. Rome : its rise and fall ; a text-book for high schools and colleges. ately has its historybeen connected with that of the peninsula. In ancienttimes it was the meeting-place and battle-ground of theCarthaginians, Greeks, and Romans. This island had some such influence upon Roman historyas the islands of the ^Egean Sea exerted upon the historyof Greece. As the islands which stud that sea were, ineffect, stepping-stones that drew the inhabitants of conti-nental Greece to the shores of Asia Minor and thus made 1 During the Middle Ages this name was transferred to the south-western part of Italy, that is, to the toe of the peninsula, and this f(the Calabria of to-day. ITALY AND ITS EARLY INHABITANTS. those lands a part of the Greek world, so was Sicily astepping-stone that, as we shall learn (par. %&), enticedthe Romans to the African shore, and thus started themon a career of foreign conquest which did not end untiltheir armies had made not only North Africa but all theother Mediterranean lands a part of the empire of Rome. THE MOUNTAINSYSTEM OF ITALY. SARDI The great islands of Corsica and Sardinia, lying to thewest of Italy, were early taken possession of by the Romans(par. 97), yet they exerted no special influence, as Sicilydid, upon the course of their fortunes. 3. Mountains and Rivers. — Italy, like the other twopeninsulas of Southern Europe, Greece and Spain, has ahigh mountain barrier, the Alps, along its northern once said that the gods had raised this wall to pro-tect the peninsula from the northern barbarians. If such 4 ROME AS A KINGDOM. was the purpose of the celestial mountain-builders, it wasa strange oversight on their part that they should haveleft a great gap in the Eastern, or Julian Alps; for here isa low pass through which the barbarians, as we shall learn,often poured like devastating floods into Italy. Corresponding to the Pindus range in Greece, the Apen-nines run as a great central ridge through Italy. East-ward of the anci
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