mon rights and obligations of
the Italian confederacy. It was probably the pressure of events at
the moment rather than any comprehensive political calculation, that
gave rise to these extensions of the confederacy; but it was natural
that now at least, after the great successes achieved against
Carthage, new and wider views of policy should dawn upon the Roman
government--views which even otherwise were obviously enough suggested
by the physical features of the peninsula. Alike in a political and
in a military point of view Rome was justified in shifting its
northern boundary from the low and easily crossed Apennines to the
mighty mountain-wall that separates northern from southern Europe,
the Alps, and in combining with the sovereignty of Italy the
sovereignty of the seas and islands on the west and east of the
peninsula; and now, when by the expulsion of the Phoenicians from
Sicily the most difficult portion of the task had been already
achieved, various circumstances united to facilitate its completion
by the Roman government.

Sicily a Dependency of Italy

In the western sea which was of far more account for Italy than the
Adriatic, the most important position, the large and fertile island
of Sicily copiously furnished with harbours, had been by the peace
with Carthage transferred for the most part into the possession of the
Romans. King Hiero of Syracuse indeed, who during the last twenty-two
years of the war had adhered with unshaken steadfastness to the Roman
alliance, might have had a fair claim to an extension of territory;
but, if Roman policy had begun the war with the resolution of
tolerating only secondary states in the island, the views of the
Romans at its close decidedly tended towards the seizure of Sicily
for themselves. Hiero might be content that his territory--namely, in
addition to the immediate district of Syracuse, the domains of Elorus,
Neetum, Acrae, Leontini, Megara, and Tauromenium--and his independence
in relation to foreign powers, were (for want of any pretext to
curtail them) left to him in their former compass; he might well be
content that the war between the two great powers had not ended in
the complete overthrow of the one or of the other, and that there
consequently still remained at least a possibility of subsistence for
the intermediate power in Sicily. In the remaining and by far the
larger portion of Sicily, at Panormus, Lilybaeum, Agrigentum, Messana,
the Romans effect