The Rise of Rome: The Making of the World's Greatest Empire by Anthony Everitt Page B

seaboard, there was sometimes hardly space for a road to run between steep heights and the sea. There was little good land and few harbors. Finally, as our eagle approached Italy’s boot and high heel, the chain widened out into the dry, windy prairies of Apulia.
    The western coastline was a friendlier place. The beautiful hill country of Etruria, intersected and circumscribed by mountain ranges, contained few but extremely productive plains. Along with Varro, another first-century B.C . polymath, Posidonius, the Greek philosopher, politician, geographer, and historian, noted that the Etruscans’ very high standard of living was due in large part to the fecundity of their land, which nourished all manner of fruits and vegetables: “In general, Etruria, being altogether abundant, consists of extended open fields and is traversed at intervals by areas which rise up like hills and yet are fit for ploughing; also, it enjoys moderate rainfall not only in the winter season but in the summer as well.” To the south lay the broad, productive expanses of Latium and Campania. This is where Rome had the good fortune to be founded.
    ITALY FACES WESTWARD . Its only disadvantage is that there are few navigable rivers and few good natural harbors along its littoral. Any great state to come into being there would have to be an agricultural land power rather than a nation of sailors.
    This fact had a profound effect on a Roman’s idea of himself, on his collective identity. The teeming countryside of Latium was close to his deepest feelings about place and about the good life. When in the city, he longed for an idealized smallholding. Describing the happy man, the poet Horace (properly Quintus HoratiusFlaccus), who flourished a little after Cicero’s day, gave this nostalgia its classic formulation:
[He] avoids the haughty portals of
great men, and likewise the Forum;
he weds his lofty poplar trees
to nubile shoots of vine;
in some secluded dale reviews
his lowing, wandering herds;
he prunes back barren shoots
with his hook and grafts on fruitful;
he stores pressed honey in clean jars;
he shears the harmless sheep.
    Elsewhere, such a man gratefully acknowledges his good fortune when he acquires a small farm:
This is what I prayed for. A piece of land—not so very big,
with a garden and, near the house, a spring that never fails,
and a bit of wood to round it off. All this and more
the gods have granted. So be it. I ask for nothing else.
    This taste for rural simplicity went hand in hand with a belief that, originally, Romans were brave and frugal. The neighboring Sabines, a different group from those who were now Roman citizens, were famous for maintaining a severe, old-fashioned morality for many centuries and ignored the comforts of a later, decadent epoch. The city of Rome itself was more virtuous and more admirable when it had hardly become a city. Propertius, a younger contemporary of Cicero and Varro, evoked a remote, admirable past:
The Curia, now standing high and resplendent with Senators’ purple-fringed togas,
then housed skin-clad Fathers, rural hearts.
Horns gathered the old-time citizens to the moot:
a hundred of them in an enclosure in a meadow formed the Senate.
    In this golden age, there was little gold to be found. Politicians were poor and disinterested, and patriots. Only time would tell whether this ideal state of affairs would survive the growth of Roman wealth and power.
    THE STONE AGE opened about two and a half million years ago, when early human beings began to use stone tools. An empty Italy, capable of supporting life, became a home for successive waves of incomers. Small bands, perhaps twenty-five to a hundred strong, roamed the peninsula, gathering edible plants and hunting, or scavenging, wild animals.
    Around the year 10,000, the planet warmed markedly and sea levels rose. The conditions of life eased. Human beings learned to farm and began to give up their nomadic ways. They developed pottery, and