losses it brought to her commerce; and, in 241, she sued for peace. To obtain it she withdrew from Sicily and paid a heavy war indemnity. Hiero, who after the first years of the war had become a faithful ally of Rome, remained master of Syracuse. The rest of Sicily passed under the rule of Rome.

III. FROM THE FIRST TO THE SECOND PUNIC WAR, 241-218 B.C.

(The Expansion of Italy to its Natural Borders, and the Organization of the New Conquests.)

366. The Addition of Sardinia and Corsica. Sagacious Romans looked forward to another struggle with Carthage. That conflict, however, did not come for twenty-three years. Meantime Rome pushed wider the borders of Italy. When the mercenaries of Carthage were withdrawn from Sicily to Africa, they were left unpaid and they soon broke into revolt. The Libyan tribes joined the rising, and a ferocious struggle followed between Carthage and the rebels. The war is known as the War of the Mercenaries, and sometimes as the Inexpiable War. At last the great Carthaginian leader, Hamilcar Barca, stamped out the revolt in Africa; but meantime the movement had spread to Sardinia and Corsica, and, in 238, the rebels offered these islands to Rome.

The temptation was too much for Roman honor. The offer was shamelessly accepted, and a protest from distracted Carthage was met sternly by a threat of war. The islands became Roman possessions, and the Tyrrhenian Sea was turned into a Roman lake.

367. The Adriatic a Roman Sea. - This period marks also the first Roman enterprise on the east of Italy. Illyria had risen into a considerable state, in friendly relations with Macedonia. The Illyrian coasts were the homes of countless pirates, who swarmed forth in great fleets to harry the commerce of the adjoining waters. Finally these pirates even captured Corcyra. Other Greek towns complained loudly to

Rome. Rome sent a haughty embassy to demand order from the Illyrian queen. The embassy was assaulted murderously, and Rome declared war. In a brief campaign (229 B.C.) she swept the pirates from the Adriatic and forced Illyria to sue for peace. The Adriatic had become a Roman water-way. At this time Rome kept no territory on the eastern coast; but the Greek cities had learned to look to her for protection, and accordingly Macedonia began to regard her with a jealous eye.

368. The Addition of Cisalpine Gaul. A few years later came a great addition of territory on the north. Rome had begun to plant colonies on the border of Cisalpine Gaul. Naturally the Gauls were alarmed and angered, and, in 225, for the last time they threatened Italy. They penetrated to within three days' march of Rome; but Italian patriotism rallied around the endangered capital, and the barbarians were crushed.

Then Rome resolutely took the offensive, and, by 222, Cisalpine Gaul had become a Roman possession, garrisoned by numerous colonies and traversed by a great military road. At last Rome had pushed her northern boundary from the low Apennines to the great crescent wall of the Alps.1

369. Organization of the Conquests outside of Italy: the Provincial System. - On the whole, Rome had been generous and wise in her treatment of united Italy; but all her conquests since the war with Pyrrhus (Cisalpine Gaul as truly as the islands) were looked upon as outside of Italy (§ 255). The distance of the new possessions from Rome and the character of the countries seemed to make impossible in them the kind

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1 EXERCISE. Observe carefully the steps of Roman expansion from 367 to The period 367-266 consolidated Apennine Italy (§ 255). In the next fifty years this narrow " 'Italy" had been rounded out to its true borders by three great steps. (1) The First Punic War, filling half the period, added Sicily. (2) The other great islands bounding Italian waters on the west were seized soon after, treacherously, from Carthage in the hour of her deathstruggle with her revolted troops. (3) Then, having provoked the Gauls to war, Rome became mistress of the valley of the Po. Meantime Roman authority had been successfully asserted, also, in the sea bordering Italy on

the east.