Walker - 1967 - A geography of Italy

PART l: SOME GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORY
bloody trial o f the Second Punic War was Rome in a position to renew the
attempt. Those Celts who remained south o f the Alps were subjugated and a
steady influx o f Italian settlers claimed the area for Latin civilization. In the east
o f the Plain the tenitory o f the friendly Cenomani and Veneti was peacefully
occupied; in the west the Ligurian tribes were steadily pacified. The abandoned
colonies o f Cremona and Placentia were re-settled and others planted at Parma,
Mutina and Bononia along the Via Aemilia; Aquileia’s function was to thwart
barbarian attacks from Illyria and from the Pannonian Basin through the low
Carnic and Julian Alps. All these northern colonies were big (Cremona and
Placentia comprised 6000 families each) and the grants o f land, graded according
to rank, were unusually generous.^
T h e Roman settlement o f Italy briefly outlined above was to last without
serious challenge for 700 years, and even afterwards, despite numerous folk
invasions, the Latin stamp of people and culture was never to be effaced. This
was particularly important in the rich Po Valley, so attractive to invaders and so
vulnerable in spite o f the deceptive Alpine barrier. But for the thorough Italian
settlement in the second and first centuries BC the area might well have remained
part o f the central European Celtic sphere. In the islands too, despite repeated
foreign occupations and Sicily’s strong Hellenic traditions, Latin culture emerged
triumphant.
R O M AN G EO G R APH Y
Roman and Latin civilization, despite later urbanization, was in many ways
basically agrarian; no civilized ancient people seems to have been less interested
in trade and industry. Even when Rome controlled the Mediterranean and the
neighbouring countries to the north and east o f it, the Romans did not exploit
their central position at the waist o f the Mediterranean, nor the opportunities
for the exchange o f manufactures and raw materials with the barbarian northerners.
The trading potentialities o f Massilia, Syracuse and Messana had been
grasped by the Greeks, and those o f Gades and Carthage by the Punic peoples,
but the Romans with their yeoman traditions and ideals continued to regard
agricultural land as the soimdest form o f wealth. For the senatorial class, whose
models were Cincinnatus and Cato, trade was considered unworthy, and even
forbidden by law. Land speculation and the pickings offered by pro-consular
offices in the provinces were the normal means o f enrichment. A t no time was a
serious attempt made to make Italy or Rome the manufacturing and trading
centre o f the Empire. In fact, even in Italy as time went on, trade and manufacture
were taken over more and more by foreigners, chiefly Greeks, and even the
Bernard but Sir Gavin de Beer makes out a convincing case for the Col de la Traversette,
at the headwaters of the Po. See Alps and Elephants.
^Formerly the grant for the ordinary settler seems to have been about five jugera; at
Bononia it was fifty (thirty-one acres).
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