to the Alps above Nice and Antibes,
directed against the Ligurian Oxybii and Decietae, was undertaken by
the Romans in 600 partly at the request of the Massiliots, partly
in their own interest; and after hot conflicts, some of which were
attended with much loss, this district of the mountains was compelled
to furnish thenceforth standing hostages to the Massiliots and to pay
them a yearly tribute. It is not improbable that about this same
period the cultivation of the vine and olive, which flourished in this
quarter after the model set by the Massiliots, was in the interest
of the Italian landholders and merchants simultaneously prohibited
throughout the territory beyond the Alps dependent on Massilia.(1)
A similar character of financial speculation marks the war, which was
waged by the Romans under the consul Appius Claudius in 611 against the
Salassi respecting the gold mines and gold washings of Victumulae (in
the district of Vercelli and Bard and in the whole valley of the Dorea
Baltea). The great extent of these washings, which deprived the
inhabitants of the country lying lower down of water for their fields,
first gave rise to an attempt at mediation and then to the armed
intervention of the Romans. The war, although the Romans began it
like all the other wars of this period with a defeat, led at last to
the subjugation of the Salassi, and the cession of the gold district
to the Roman treasury. Some forty years afterwards (654) the colony of
Eporedia (Ivrea) was instituted on the territory thus gained, chiefly
doubtless with a view to command the western, as Aquileia commanded
the eastern, passage of the Alps.

Transalpine Relations of Rome
The Arverni

These Alpine wars first assumed a more serious character, when Marcus
Fulvius Flaccus, the faithful ally of Gaius Gracchus, took the chief
command in this quarter as consul in 629. He was the first to enter
on the career of Transalpine conquest. In the much-divided Celtic
nation at this period the canton of the Bituriges had lost its
real hegemony and retained merely an honorary presidency, and the
actually leading canton in the region from the Pyrenees to the Rhine
and from the Mediterranean to the Western Ocean was that of the
Arverni;(2) so that the statement seems not quite an exaggeration,
that it could bring into the field as many as 180,000 men. With
them the Haedui (about Autun) carried on an unequal rivalry for the
hegemony; while in north-easte