transmarine possessions were not merely placed on the footing of land
held by subjects, but were destined to remain on that footing in all
time to come; whereas the official field recently marked off by law
for the consuls, or, which is the same thing, the continental
territory of the Romans, was to become a new and more extended Italy,
which should reach from the Alps to the Ionian sea. In the first
instance, indeed, this essentially geographical conception of Italy
was not altogether coincident with the political conception of the
Italian confederacy; it was partly wider, partly narrower. But even
now the Romans regarded the whole space up to the boundary of the Alps
as -Italia-, that is, as the present or future domain of the -togati-
and, just as was and still is the case in North America, the boundary
was provisionally marked off in a geographical sense, that the field
might be gradually occupied in a political sense also with the advance
of colonization.(10)

Events on the Adriatic Coasts

In the Adriatic sea, at the entrance of which the important and long-
contemplated colony of Brundisium had at length been founded before
the close of the war with Carthage (510), the supremacy of Rome was
from the very first decided. In the western sea Rome had been obliged
to rid herself of rivals; in the eastern, the quarrels of the Hellenes
themselves prevented any of the states in the Grecian peninsula from
acquiring or retaining power. The most considerable of them, that of
Macedonia, had through the influence of Egypt been dislodged from the
upper Adriatic by the Aetolians and from the Peloponnesus by the
Achaeans, and was scarcely even in a position to defend its northern
frontier against the barbarians. How concerned the Romans were to
keep down Macedonia and its natural ally, the king of Syria, and how