The only part of Italy of which the ethnology is even moderately simple is the part belonging to Sardinia, or Piedmont. Here the original occupancy was Ligurian. Eporedia, the modern Ivrea, is particularly mentioned as a Ligurian town, and, as its name has generally been considered Keltic, it has supplied one of the arguments in favour of the Ligurians being a branch of that stock. Bodencomagus, too, has already been mentioned. The ancient name of the Upper Po, Eridanus, appears to contain the same root as the name Rhodanus, and, perhaps, as Rhenus; whilst Scingo-_magus_ and Rigo-_magus_ give us further instances of the evidently Keltic termination -_magus_. The parts south of the Po, which alone constituted the true and proper Liguria in the political sense of the term, were reduced between the second and third Punic wars; the following being Niebuhr’s account of them:-- “The Ligurian war is not only insignificant, in comparison with others, but extremely obscure, on account of our want of an accurate geographical knowledge of the country. It has some resemblance to the present undertakings against the Caucasian tribes. The Apennines are not, indeed, as high as the Caucasus, but they offer the same advantages for their inhabitants to defend themselves. The Ligurians were ultimately annihilated, which is always the unavoidable fate of such nations, when a powerful state is bent upon their destruction. The Ligurian tribes extended in reality as far as the river Rhone; but as the Romans were chiefly concerned in securing the frontiers of Etruria, they made themselves masters only of the territory of Genoa. The wars did not extend beyond the river Varus, or the frontiers of Provence, for the hostilities against the Salyes in the neighbourhood of Massilia belong to a later period. The Ligurian tribes defended themselves and their poverty with such resolute determination, that the Romans, who could not expect any rich spoils, aimed at nothing short of extirpating them, or expelling them from their mountains. The consuls, P. Cornelius Cethegus and M. Bæbius Tamphilus, therefore transplanted 50,000 Ligurians into Samnium, where Frontinus, as late as the second century of our own era, found their descendants under the name of the Cornelian and Bæbian Ligurians. The war was brought to a close before that against Perseus. It was especially for the purpose of exercising control over Gaul that the high road of Flaminius, which went as far as Ariminum, was now continued, under the name of _via Flaminia_, as far as Placentia, and that the whole country south of the Po was so much filled with colonies, that the Keltic population disappeared.” But the parts to the north of that river were conquered later, the Salassi of the valley of Aosta in the reign of Augustus.