The great change in Roman policy, and in European geography as affected by it, took place when Rome began to win territory out of Italy. The relation of these foreign possessions to the ruling city was quite different from that of the Italian states. The foreign conquests of Rome were made into _provinces_. ♦Nature of the Roman Provinces.♦ A province was a district which was subject to Rome, and put under the rule of a Roman governor, which was not done with the dependent allies in Italy. But it must be borne in mind that, though we speak of a province as having a certain geographical extent, yet there might be cities within its limits whose formal relation to Rome was that of dependent, or even of equal, alliance. There might also be Roman and Latin colonies, either colonies really planted or cities which had been raised to the Roman or Latin franchise. All these were important distinctions as regarded the internal government of the different states; still practically all alike formed part of the Roman dominion. In a geographical survey it will therefore be enough to mark the extent of the different provinces, without attending to their political, or more truly municipal, distinctions, except in a few cases where they are of special importance. ♦Eastern and Western Provinces.♦ The provinces then are the foreign dominions of Rome, and they fall naturally into two, or rather three, divisions. There are the provinces of the West, in which the Romans had chiefly to contend with nations much less civilized than themselves, and in which therefore the provincials gradually adopted the language and manners of their conquerors. But in the provinces to the east of the Hadriatic, the Greek language and Greek manners had become the language and manners of civilized life, and their supremacy was not supplanted by those of Rome. And in the more distant parts, as in Syria and Egypt, the Greek civilization was a mere varnish; the mass of the people still kept to their old manners and languages as they were before the Macedonian conquests. In these countries therefore the Latin tongue and Roman civilization made but little progress. The Roman conquests went on on both sides of the Hadriatic at the same time, but it was to the west that they began. The first Roman province however forms a sort of intermediate class by itself, standing between the eastern and the western. ♦Sicily.♦