We are now, I would have you see, at a point of some particular interest in the great story, for it is the first time that Greek and Roman have been facing each other and fighting each other in any large force and as nation against nation. Pyrrhus, after his victories, called on Rome to surrender. His army was then on the Roman territory of Latium. Rome replied that she would hold no parley with a foe as long as any of his troops were on her soil. It was a proud reply, worthy of her future greatness, to a victorious enemy at her very gates; but she had formed a strong confederation of several states that acknowledged her as their sovereign and was still formidable. Pyrrhus won another victory, but again gained little by it, and finding that his project did not prosper in Italy itself he went over to Sicily. He came to that island on the invitation of the Greek city states there, who wished his help to rid them of the Carthaginians, but here again, although he won victories, he could not establish his power. He {169} made himself thoroughly unpopular with the Greeks, who had called him in, by the despotic manner in which he tried to lord it over them, and, what was still worse for him, his attacks on the Carthaginians drove them to make an alliance with the Romans against him. A result of that alliance was that when, after three years of unproductive fighting in Sicily, he went back to the mainland of Italy, his fleet was attacked and severely handled by the Carthaginians. He fought one more battle against the Romans and their confederates, in Italy, but he did not receive much support from the Tarentines or any of the Italian-Greek cities. This time it was not even a "Pyrrhic victory" for him, but a decisive defeat, and he went back to his native Epirus after a six years' absence. He was killed some years later in a political revolution in Greece. The total result of the enterprise of Pyrrhus was to establish Rome more firmly than ever as the mistress state of Italy, and to bring her into alliance, which was very soon to be broken, with the great sea-power of the Carthaginians. The story of Rome herself, within the city walls, during all the years from the expulsion of the Etruscan kings down to the date, about 280 B.C., to which we have now come, was one of perpetual struggle between the patricians, the aristocratic party, and the plebs, the party of the people, the populace. The patricians had all the power after the first driving out of the Tarquins, as the Etruscan kings were called, because they had been the chief managers of the revolution against them, but all through the later years the populace grew in power, and took the power out of the hands of the patricians. The constitution of the state became, as we should say, more and more democratic. {170} The power fell more and more into the hands of the "demos," the plebeians, the common people.