How the Latin city of Rome marched to the headship of Latium, how the head of Latium marched to the headship of Italy, are matters of Roman rather than of universal history. The œcumenical calling of Rome comes upon her as soon as she has become the head of Italy, perhaps more strictly in the very moment of her becoming such. She is not fully head of Italy till she has beaten back the invader from Epeiros from the shores of her peninsula. But her war with Pyrrhos had brought her into the thick of the Greek world and all its complications. Unless we accept the tales of her earlier dealings with Massalia, Rome has not yet sought either Greek allies or Greek enemies beyond the bounds of Italy. But Greece, in the person of her foremost champion, had come to seek out Rome within those bounds. The fight of Beneventum ruled that Italy should be Italian; it ruled that no Greek power should arise in Western Europe to balance the realms of Ptolemy and Seleukos in the East. It ruled in short that the head of Italy should be Rome. The wars which Rome had waged against the Samnite and the Gaul had made her beyond all comparison the first power in Italy. The war with Pyrrhos, the war that threatened to make Italy, like Asia or Egypt, part of a Greek dominion, made her the undoubted head. The head of Italy now stood forth as one of the great powers of the world. It marks one of the differences between the political state of those days and that of our own that Rome had no sooner undoubtedly risen to this position than she found herself engaged in a struggle, a struggle well nigh for life and death, with the other great power of the Western Mediterranean. In the modern world, whatever jealousies, controversies, wars, may arise between any of the great powers of Europe, none seeks the utter destruction of any other, none seeks the abiding weakening of any other, its degradation from the rank of a great power. But the establishment of Rome as the undoubted head of Italy, as one of the two greatest powers of the West, at once condemned her to abiding rivalry with the other power, a rivalry which might be salved over by this or that interval of peace, but which meant that, sooner or later, either Rome or Carthage must perish. We must remember that, while between any other two of the great wars of Rome there was some slight interval of peace, the war with Pyrrhos and the Italian allies of Pyrrhos was followed without any break whatever by the first war with Carthage. That war was the War for Sicily. On any theory of natural boundaries, a power that was the head of Italy might reasonably, so far as there is reason in such matters, expect to spread its dominion over the lands within the Alps, and over the three great islands which look like natural appendages to the peninsula of Italy. And a power which spread itself over the lands within the Alps, a power which from its own shores could look out on the mountains of Illyricum, could hardly