The last and decisive battle with the Latins took its name, as we saw, from Mount Vesuvius, and the reader who knows the map of Italy will ask how it came to be fought so far south of Latium, in the large and fertile plain of Campania, near the modern city of Naples. The answer is that a powerful State, such as Rome was now becoming, is liable to be appealed to by weaker communities when in trouble; and the Campanians, attacked by the hill-men from the central mountainous region of the Samnites, had appealed for help to Rome. This was given, but the Romans found it necessary to make peace with these Samnites, and left the Campanians in the lurch, and then the latter threw in their lot with the Latins, and the Latin war drifted south to Campania. At the end of that war they were treated in much the same way as the Latins; and thus Rome now found herself presiding with irresistible force over a territory that included both the plains of western Italy and all its most valuable land, and over a confederacy in which all the advantages were on her side, and all the resources of the members under her control. But to be mistress of these two plains was not as yet to be mistress of Italy. Those plains, and especially the southern and more valuable one, had to be defended from the mountaineers of the central highlands of the peninsula: a region which the reader should at this point of our story study carefully in his map. Towards the end of the Latin war these highlanders, Samnites, as the Romans called them, had ceased raiding the Campanian plain, for they in their turn had to defend southern Italy against an unexpected enemy. The strong and wealthy Greek merchant-city of Tarentum, just inside the “heel” of Italy, destined to play an important part in Italian history for the next century, had lately had its lands raided by the Samnites and their kin the Lucanians to the south of them, and had called in Greeks from oversea to help them. Here we come into touch with Greek history, just at the time when Alexander the Great was the leading figure in the Greek world. A Spartan king came over to aid Tarentum, and lost his life in so doing; then Alexander of Epirus was induced to come, an uncle of the great conqueror: and after a period of success against the Samnites, he was assassinated. It is said that Rome came to an understanding with him, and it is likely enough; there must have been men in the great Council at Rome who were already accustomed to look far ahead, and keep themselves informed of what was going on far away in Italy and even beyond the Italian seas. Her long struggle for existence had taught her venerable statesmen the arts of diplomacy, and we are not surprised to learn that after the death of Alexander she began to form alliances in that far country between the Samnites and Tarentum, much of which was rich and fertile, in order that when the inevitable struggle with the hill-men should come, she might