Dentatus had the grandest triumph that had ever been known at Rome,
with the elephants walking in the procession, the first that the Romans
had ever seen. All the spoil was given up to the commonwealth; and when,
some time after, it was asserted that he had taken some for himself, it
turned out that he had only kept one old wooden vessel, which he used in
sacrificing to the gods.

The Greeks of Southern Italy had behaved very ill to Pyrrhus and turned
against him. The Romans found them so fickle and troublesome that they
were all reduced in one little war after another. The Tarentines had to
surrender and lose their walls and their fleet, and so had the people of
Sybaris, who have become a proverb for idleness, for they were so lazy
that they were said to have killed all their crowing-birds for waking
them too early in the morning. All the peninsula of Italy now belonged
to Rome, and great roads were made of paved stones connecting them with
it, many of which remain to this day, even the first of all, called the
Appian Way, from Rome to Capua, which was made under the direction of
the censor Appius Claudius, during the Samnite war.




CHAPTER XVII.

THE FIRST PUNIC WAR.

264-240.


We are now come to the time when Rome became mixed up in wars with