What Calza found at Ostia was a coastguard station, or _castrum_, planted by the Romans at the river’s mouth once their control of the sea was established by their victory over Antium’s navy (which produced the bronze beaks on the Rostra). The normal complement of such a station was 300 men. A contingent of that size could have manned Ostia’s _castrum_ wall with one soldier every six feet. Thus the prime motive of the founding was military, and the _castrum_ plan is like the familiar and standard plan of a Roman army camp. But the civilian plan antedated the military: Polybius in his description of the Roman camp of about 150 B.C. says that it was planned _like a town_ (_i.e._, with a rectangular grid like Marzabotto). And Ostia’s function must from the beginning, or soon after, have been commercial as well as military. Its site at the river mouth was as ideal for collecting the customs as for guarding the coast. Grain from Egypt and Sicily to feed Rome may from the earliest days have been landed here and stored in warehouses for later shipment upriver by barge. At all events history records the appointment as early as 267 B.C. of a special finance officer or _quaestor_ for Ostia, and Calza found the footings of warehouses of Republican date. The terracotta revetments mentioned above date from this period. The houses and shops remained humble for seven generations, but those generations saw the departure of many a fleet, and the arrival of many a consignment of grain. An inscription dated in 171 B.C. marking the limits of public land in Ostia shows that by then it had expanded far beyond the _castrum_ walls. But the story of Ostia’s development, her new wall under Sulla, new theater under Augustus, new port under Claudius, new garden apartment houses under Trajan, and the rest, belong to later chapters. * * * * * In the last half of the fourth century Rome fought two wars against the Samnites. Alba Fucens (Fig. 4.3) in the Abruzzi, one of her advanced bases in the Second Samnite War, has been explored since 1949 by the Belgians. It lies 3315 feet above sea level, on the Via Valeria sixty-eight miles east-northeast of Rome. (The sixty-eighth milestone of the Valeria was found _in situ_ inside the colony wall.) Alba’s site dominates five valleys. The Latin colony of 6000 families planted here in 303 B.C. assured Rome’s communications on two sides of Samnium, eastward to the Adriatic and southeastward through the Liris valley. [Illustration: FIG. 4.3 Alba Fucens, plan. (J. B. Ward Perkins, “Early Roman Towns in Italy,” Fig. 9)]