The position occupied then by Rome would of itself have made active participation in Mediterranean affairs a necessity. The embroilment of Romans in the conflicts in which international politics is expressed was precipitated by the ambition of the restless Diadochi and their successors. It was a kinsman of the lurid Demetrius the Besieger, the Epirote prince Pyrrhus, who undertook to save the Greek civilization of the coast cities from the Italian barbarians. Pyrrhus ultimately retired with his tail between his legs, after having dragged the Romans into Sicily and brought them face to face with the Carthaginians. The succeeding three generations were occupied in the mortal grapple between these two. It ended with the triumph of Rome. So far Rome had dealt only with the West, but with the permanent eastward bent of men’s minds the lord of the Western Mediterranean was, as such, a power in the East as well. Scarcely a single generation passed before it became the sole power in the East, so that future political history becomes the act of officially recording successive realizations of that fact. And yet, this extraordinary people, which had in an astoundingly short time secured the primacy over a considerable fraction of the earth, was apparently possessed of slighter intellectual endowments than many of its subjects. It had not succeeded in giving such culture as it had developed any artistic form. And before it had taken any steps in that direction, it came into immediate contact with nations of much older culture, which had done so; in one case, a nation which had carried artistry of form to a degree never subsequently attained by any single people. First, the Etruscans had given in bulk a mass of finished cultural elements, especially in religion and constructive crafts, and had otherwise exercised an influence now wholly undeterminable. Secondly, by Etruscan mediation and afterwards directly, the Romans became the intellectual vassals of the Greeks, a fact that lends some justification to the modern tendency to treat classical antiquity as a single term. The Romans obtained their very earliest knowledge of the Jews when the political and social development just outlined was practically complete.