Thus the “peasants of the Tiber” became masters of the Balkan peninsula as well as of that of Italy. In the same period they completed the conquest of Italy up to the Alps, not without difficulties and defeats, and went on driving their roads and planting colonies in all parts. In the Spanish peninsula, from which the Carthaginians had been finally driven, they now established two permanent commands (_provinciæ_), one in the basin of the Ebro in the north-east, and the other in the fertile valleys of the Guadiana and Guadalquivir, as the two great rivers of southern Spain are now called. From these they slowly but persistently, after their manner, and in spite of many defeats and even disgraces, pushed up into the high tablelands of central Spain, until they had brought the greater part of the peninsula under their sway. Here they had to deal with a people very different from the weary and exhausted Greeks and Macedonians; a people only half civilised, but lively, intelligent and capable of making excellent soldiers, as Hannibal had found. It is to the credit of the Romans that, in spite of much cruelty and misgovernment, they gave this peninsula a real civilisation, of which the traces are still abundant especially in the south, and a beautiful language, which descends directly from their own. In order to maintain their communications with Spain by land as well as by sea, they also had to look to the coast between the western Alps and the Pyrenees. Here they made a lasting alliance with the ancient and flourishing Greek colony, Massilia (Marseille); and in defending Massilia from the attacks of mountain tribes they were gradually drawn into the acquisition of a permanent hold on the lower valley of the Rhone. This, again, in due time very naturally became the starting-point for fresh advance into the heart of modern France. No one who has seen the Rhone from Lyons to Marseilles can resist the conclusion that a power in possession of its lower reaches must inevitably advance along it northward.