one of the great Etrurian cities, not one of the twelve
cities of the Etruscan League. Volterra occupies the site of the large
Tuscan town which lorded it over this part of the Lower Apennines. But
Faesulae must still have been a considerable place, to judge by the
magnitude and importance of its fortifications, and it must have
gathered into itself the entire population of all the little Arno
plain. As long as _fortis Etruria crevit_, Faesulae must always have held
its own as a frontier post against the Ligurian foe. But when _fortis
Etruria_ began to decline, and Rome to become the summit of all things,
the glory of Faesulae received a severe shock. Not indeed by
conquest--that counts for little--but the Roman peace introduced into
Italy a new order of things, fatal to the hill-tops. Sulla, who humbled
Faesulae, did far worse than that: he planted a Roman colony in the
valley at its foot--the colony of Florentia--at the point where the
road crossed the Arno--the colony that was afterwards to become the
most famous commercial and artistic town of the mediaeval world as
Florence.

The position of the new town marks the change that had come over the
conditions of life in Upper Italy. Florence was a Fiesole descended to
the plain. And it descended for just the selfsame reason that made
Bishop Poore thirteen centuries later bring down Sarum from its lofty
hill-top to the new white minster by the ford of Avon. Roads,
communications, internal trade were henceforth to exist and to count
for much; what was needed now was a post and trading town on the river
to guard the passage from north to south against possible aggression.
Fiesole had been but a mountain stronghold; Florence was marked from
the very beginning by its mere position as a great commercial and
manufacturing town.

Nevertheless, just as in mediaeval England the upper town on the hill,
the castled town of the barons, often existed for many years side by
side with the lower town on the river, the high-road town of the
merchant guilds--just as Old Sarum, for example, continued to exist
side by side with Salisbury--so Faesulae continued to exist side by side
with Florentia. As a military post, commanding the plain, it was
needful to retain it; and so, though Sulla destroyed in part its
population, he reinstated it before long as one of his own Roman
colonies. And for a long time, during the ages of doubtful peace that
succeeded the first glorious flush of the mili