HKB
on the Mediterranean.[282] Agde (Agatha), Antibes (Antipolis), Nice (Nicæa), the isles of Hyères (Stœchades), Monaco (Portus Herculis Monœcei), were so many naval stations which maintained relations with Spain and Italy.[283]
Marseilles possessed but a very circumscribed territory, but its influence reached far into the interior of Gaul. It is to this town we owe the acclimatisation of the vine and the olive. Thousands of oxen came every year to feed on the thyme in the neighbourhood of Marseilles.[284] The Massilian merchants traversed Gaul in all directions to sell their wines and the produce of their manufactures.[285] Without rising to the rank of a great maritime power, still the small Phocæan republic possessed sufficient resources to make itself respected by Carthage; it formed an early alliance with the Romans. Massilian houses had, as early as the fifth century of Rome, established at Syracuse, as they did subsequently at Alexandria, factories which show a great commercial activity.[286]
[Sidenote: Liguria, Cisalpine Gaul, Venetia, and Illyria.]
V. Alone in the Tyrrhene Sea, the Ligures had not yet risen out of that almost savage life which the Iberians, sprung from the same stock, had originally led. If some towns on the Ligurian coast, and especially Genoa (Genua), carried on a maritime commerce, they supported themselves by piracy[287] rather than by regular traffic.[288]
On the contrary, Cisalpine Gaul, properly so called, supported, as early as the time of Polybius, a numerous population. We may form some idea of it from the losses this province sustained during a period of twenty-seven years, from 554 to 582; Livy gives a total of 257,400 men killed, taken, or transported.[289] The Gaulish tribes settled in the Cisalpine, though preserving their original manners, had, through their contact with the Etruscans, arrived at a certain degree of civilisation. The number of towns in this country was not very considerable, but it contained a great abundance of villages.[290] Addicted to agriculture like the other Gauls, the Cisalpines bred in their forests droves of swine in such numbers, that they would have been sufficient, in the time of Strabo, to provision all Rome.[291] The coins of pure gold, which in recent times have been found in Cisalpine Gaul, especially between the Po and the Adda, and which were struck by the Boii and some of the Ligurian populations, furnish evidence of the abundance of that metal, which was collected in the form of gold sand in the waters of the rivers.[292] Moreover, certain towns of Etruscan origin, such as Mantua (Mantua) and Padua (Patavium), preserved vestiges of the prosperity they had reached at the time when the peoples of Tuscany extended their dominion beyond the Po. At once a maritime town and a place of commerce, Padua, at a remote epoch, possessed a vast territory, and could raise an army of 120,000 men.[293] The transport of goods was facilitated by means of canals crossing Venetia, partly dug by the Etruscans. Such were those especially which united Ravenna with Altinum (Altino), which became at a later period the grand store-house of the Cisalpine territory.[294]
The commercial relations entertained by Venetia with Germany, Illyria, and Rhætia, go back far beyond the Roman epoch, and, at a remote antiquity, it was Venetia which received the amber from the shores of the Baltic.[295] All the traffic which was afterwards concentrated at Aquileia, founded by the Romans after the submission of the Veneti, had then for its centre the towns of Venetia; and the numerous colonies established by the Romans in this part of the peninsula are proofs of its immense resources. Moreover, the Veneti, occupied in cultivating their lands and breeding horses, had peaceful manners which facilitated commercial relations, and contrasted with the piratical habits of the populations spread over the north and north-eastern coasts of the Adriatic.