Outlines of Roman History

nturies as the Campagna. It is bounded to the north by the more hilly country of Northern Etruria, on the east by the mountain range of the Apennines, on the south by the Volscian highlands.' This strip of lowland, nearly one hundred miles long, and nowhere much more than thirty miles wide, is in not an unbroken level. Its undulating surface is furrowed by watercourses, rent by volcanic fissures, and dotted over with abruptly rising hillocks. Viewed from the top of Soracte at its north-eastern extremity, or from the more famous Alban Mount, which rises out of the plain to the southward, its appearance has been compared to that of a stormy sea suddenly petrified. Of the streams which flow through it, two only, the Tiber and its tributary the AL L11C d. It i ank of/ , that " headlong Anio," have ever been important enough to deserve the name of rivers. It is with the river Tiber, the waterway which connects the Umbrian and Sabine highlands with the sea, and with this lowland country that the beginnings of Rome are inseparably associated, was on the low hills which rise from the left bank the Tiber, some fifteen miles above its mouth, Rome was built, and it was possibly from the river that it took its name.1 It was among the communities of the lowland that Rome found her natural allies against the Etruscan to the north, or against the highland tribes to the east and south. The establishment of her ascendancy over the lowland marks the first sta...