beyond the Alps, evidently wished to open up there a new and
immeasurable field for their plans of colonization,--a field which
offered the same advantages as Sicily and Africa, and could be more
easily wrested from the natives than he Sicilian and Libyan estates
from the Italian capitalists. The fall of Gaius Gracchus, no doubt,
made itself felt here also in the restriction of acquisitions of
territory and still more of the founding of towns; but, if the design
was not carried out in its full extent, it was at any rate not wholly
frustrated. The territory acquired and, still more, the foundation of
Narbo--a settlement for which the senate vainly endeavoured to prepare
the fate of that at Carthage--remained standing as parts of an
unfinished structure, exhorting the future successor of Gracchus
to continue the building. It is evident that the Roman mercantile
class, which was able to compete with Massilia in the Gallo-Britannic
traffic at Narbo alone, protected that settlement from the assaults
of the Optimates.

Illyria
Dalmatians
Their Subjugation

A problem similar to that in the north-west had to be dealt
with in the north-east of Italy; it was in like manner not wholly
neglected, but was solved still more imperfectly than the former.
With the foundation of Aquileia (571) the Istrian peninsula came
into possession of the Romans;(5) in part of Epirus and the former
territory of the lords of Scodra they had already ruled for some
considerable time previously. But nowhere did their dominion reach
into the interior; and even on the coast they exercised scarcely a
nominal sway over the inhospitable shore-belt between Istria and
Epirus, which, with its wild series of mountain-caldrons broken neither
by river-valleys nor by coast-plains and arranged like scales one above
another, and with its chain of rocky islands stretching along the
shore, separates more than it connects Italy and Greece. Around the
town of Delminium (on the Cettina near Trigl) clustered the confederacy
of the Delmatians or Dalmatians, whose manners were rough as their
mountains. While the neighbouring peoples had already attained a
high degree of culture, the Dalmatians were as yet unacquainted with
money, and divided their land, without recognizing any special right
of property in it, afresh every eight years among the members of
the community. Brigandage and piracy were the only native trades.
These tribes had in earlier times stood in a l