The Historians' History of the World 05 [The Roman Republic]

THE ROMAN PROVINCES

Italia, the region to which the privileges of the city had been conceded by the Plautian law, was bounded, as we have seen, by a line drawn across the neck of the peninsula from the Rubicon on the Adriatic, to the Isère on the Tyrrhenian Sea. To the north and south lay two provinces which held the first rank in political importance: on the one hand Gallia, or Gaul within the Alps; on the other the island of Sicily. The Gaulish province was divided into two districts by the Padus, or the Po, from whence they derived their denominations respectively, according as they lay within or beyond that river.

But the whole of this rich and extensive territory was placed under the command of a single proconsul, and the citizens soon learned to regard with jealousy a military force which menaced their own liberties at the same time that it maintained the obedience of their subjects. Sicily, on the other hand, though tranquil and generally contented, and requiring but a slender force to control it, was important to the republic from the abundance of its harvests, to which the city could most confidently look for its necessary supplies of grain. Next among the provinces in proximity to Rome were the islands of Sardinia and Corsica, of which the former also furnished Italy with grain; but both were rudely and imperfectly cultivated, and the unhealthiness of the larger island especially continued to keep it below many far remoter regions in wealth, population, and intelligence. The first province the Romans had acquired beyond their own seas was Spain, where their arms had made slow but steady progress from the period of their earliest contests with the Carthaginians, although the legions had never yet penetrated into its wildest and most distant fastnesses. The connection between Rome and her Iberian dependencies was long maintained principally by sea, while the wide territory intervening between the Alps and Pyrenees was still occupied by numerous free and jealous communities. But in the course of the last half-century the republic had acquired the command of the coast of the Gulf of Lyons; her roads were prolonged from Ariminum to Barcino and Valentia, while the communications of her armies were maintained by numerous fortified positions in the Further Gaul, and a secure and wealthy province extending from the Var to the Garonne.

The Adriatic and the Ionian straits separated Italy from her eastern acquisitions. The great provinces of Illyricum and Macedonia comprised the whole expanse of territory from the Adriatic to the Ægean Sea, and were divided from one another by the long mountain ridges of Boion and Scardus. Ancient Greece, from Thermopylæ to Cape Malea, constituted a single command under the title of Achaia. With Asia, Rome communicated principally by sea, the route of the Hellespont being insecure, and the barbarous tribes of Thrace but imperfectly subjected. The province of Asia, recovered by Sulla, was held by an imperator with a numerous army, destined to control the dependent potentates of Bithynia, Cilicia, and Cappadocia. The eastern proconsul watched the movements of Mithridates, and unravelled his intrigues with every court from the Halys to the Tigris. He intruded himself into the affairs of Cyprus, Palestine, and Egypt, hunted down the mountaineers of Crete, and menaced with the vengeance of the republic the buccaneers who swarmed in every harbour of the eastern Mediterranean. On the southern coasts of the great inland sea the domain which once belonged to Carthage, limited on either side by the lesser Syrtis and the river Bagradas, formed the proconsular province of Africa; while the five cities of the Pentapolis acknowledged their entire dependence on the will of the republic. The extent of her empire under Sulla was hardly one-half of that which it attained under Augustus and Trajan.