That Latin was the common speech of the western world is attested not only by the fact that the languages of France, Spain, Roumania, and the other Romance countries descend from it, but it is also clearly shown by the thousands of Latin inscriptions composed by freeman and freedman, by carpenter, baker, and soldier, which we find all over the Roman world. How did this extraordinary result come about? It was not the conquest of the world by the common language of Italy, because in Italy in early days at least nine different languages were spoken, but its subjugation by the tongue spoken in the city of Rome. The traditional narrative of Rome, as Livy and others relate it, tells us of a struggle with the neighboring Latin hill towns in the early days of the Republic, and the ultimate formation of an alliance between them and Rome. The favorable position of the city on the Tiber for trade and defence gave it a great advantage over its rivals, and it soon became the commercial and political centre of the neighboring territory. The most important of these villages, Tusculum, Præneste, and Lanuvium, were not more than twenty miles distant, and the people in them must have come constantly to Rome to attend the markets, and in later days to vote, to hear political speeches, and to listen to plays in the theatre. Some of them probably heard the jests at the expense of their dialectal peculiarities which Plautus introduced into his comedies. The younger generations became ashamed of their provincialisms; they imitated the Latin spoken in the metropolis, and by the second century of our era, when the Latin grammarians have occasion to cite dialectal peculiarities from Latium outside Rome, they quote at second-hand from Varro of the first century B.C., either because they will not take the trouble to use their own ears or because the differences which were noted in earlier days had ceased to exist. The first stage in the conquest of the world by the Latin of Rome comes to an end, then, with the extension of that form of speech throughout Latium. Beyond the limits of Latium it came into contact with Oscan and the other Italic dialects, which were related to Latin, but of course were much farther removed from it than the Latin of Tusculum or Lanuvium had been,[2] so that the adoption of Latin was not so simple a matter as the acceptance of Roman Latin by the villages of Latium near Rome had been. The conflict which went on between Latin and its Italic kinsmen is revealed to us now and then by a Latin inscription, into which Oscan or Umbrian forms have crept.[3] The struggle had come to an end by the beginning of our era. A few Oscan inscriptions are found scratched on the walls of Pompeii after the first earthquake, in 63 A.D., but they are late survivals, and no Umbrian inscriptions are known of a date subsequent to the first century B.C.