Rome
The homeland of the Romans is Italy, a long peninsula in the center of the Mediterranean Sea. It is formed by a chain of mountains that run along the whole length of it. The mountains are called the Apennines.
Unlike Greece, Italy has few good natural harbors, so that the inhabitants were never sailors in ancient times. They were farmers. On the western side of the mountains, several small rivers had brought down earth to create a series of relatively open plains, where farming could be carried out. Most Italians lived there. Almost in the middle of the plains is the Tiber River. Rome was located on several small hills overlooking it on the south side.
Can anyone be so indifferent or idle as not to care to know by what means, and under what kind of polity, almost the whole inhabited world was conquered and brought under the dominion of the single city of Rome, and that, too, within a period of not quite fifty-three years? Or who again can be so completely absorbed in other subjects of contemplation or study, as to think any of them superior in importance to the accurate understanding of an event for which the past affords no precedent?
Polybius, Histories, I.I
Various peoples lived in Italy by 4000 B.C., but the most numerous and important inhabitants did not arrive until early in the Iron Age just after 1100 B.C. After 1100 B.C., a large number of barbarian tribes migrated into Italy from the north. The tribes spoke many different languages, but they all belonged to the Indo-European family of languages. One of them was Latin, the language of the later Romans.
The Latin-speaking tribes settled into the middle of this open land west of the mountains. The region they occupied was named for them. It was called Latium or Latin Plain. Although they had the same language and customs, the Latins were not politically united. They founded dozens of independent villages scattered throughout Latium. Later, when they became more civilized, villages located close to each other combined to form 30 small city-states. One group of villages that combined was located on the hills south of the Tiber. Rome was one of these city-states.
But neither the Latins or the other barbarians created civilization for themselves. They learned about it from other peoples. In South Italy, civilization was introduced by the Greeks. After 750 B.C., they began to settle and to set up city-states along the southern coast of Italy.
But in Latium and Central Italy, civilization was introduced by another people called the Etruscans. The Etruscans are very mysterious. We cannot read their language, and no one knows where they came from. We do know that by 800, they had begun to found city-states and to create an advanced civilization in the northwestern part of Italy, on the other side of the Tiber River from the Latins. Because they were civilized and the Latins were not, they were able to conquer and to rule some of the Latins for a brief time.
