was wielded by a single mighty commonwealth which held some of its strongest outposts, Panormos at their head, in the north-western corner of the great island. In Sicily things seem to have turned round; the European holds the eastern, the Asiatic holds the western coast. And it is now the masters of the western coast that threaten the eastern. But the Persian and the Phœnician were not the only enemies against whom the scattered Greek nation had to strive. Foes nearer to the Greek in race than the Phœnician, less widely removed in political and social institutions than the Persian, were threatening the power and the being of one great division of the Greek name. The second of the great peninsulas of southern Europe, the central one of the three, the peninsula which held Rome and Capua and the cities of the Etruscan, was beginning to come to the front in the drama of history. There was as yet no sign that Italy was to be the ruling land of the world; but there were signs that Italy was no longer to be a land in which settlers of foreign races might carve themselves homes at pleasure. The name of Rome was beginning to be heard in Hellenic ears, but it was as yet hardly a name of fear. It was as yet the native races of southern Italy that the Greek cities had to dread, and Rome was for a while the enemy of their enemies. The Persian and the Carthaginian were strictly enemies from without; the Persian was in every sense an invader of the soil of the oldest Hellas; the Carthaginian was at most winning a land in which other branches of his race had once made settlements; but the Lucanians and the other nations of southern Italy were, in the strictest sense, winning back their own land from strangers. When Kymê and Poseidônia ceased to be cities of Hellas, in one sense the boundaries of the civilized world fell back; in another we may say that they advanced, as the nations of Italy began to show that the time was come for the men of the central peninsula to play their part in the world’s history as well as the men of the older peninsula to the east of them.