IV. In maritime cities, too, a sort of debasing and changeable manners prevail. New languages and new customs are mingled together, and not only productions but manners are imported from abroad; so that nothing remains entire of the pristine institutions. Even they who inhabit those cities are not faithful to their homes, but with capricious inclinations and longings are carried far from them; and although their persons remain, their minds are rambling and wandering abroad. Nor did Carthage or Corinth, long before shaken, owe their ruin to any thing more than to the unsettled scattering of the citizens, who abandoned the study of agriculture and arms through their cupidity of gain and love of roaming. Many pernicious excitements too to luxury, are brought over the sea to cities by commercial importation or by conquest. Even the very amenity of the situation suggests many costly and enervating allurements. What I have said of Corinth, I know not if I may as truly say of all Greece; for almost all Peloponnessus lies on the sea, and except the Phliuntians, there are none whose lands do not extend to the coast. Beyond Peloponnessus, the Enianes, the Dorians, and the Dolopians are the only people in the interior. What shall I say of the islands of Greece? which surrounded with billows, float about as it were with the institutions and manners of their cities. These things as I said before, relate to ancient Greece; but of the colonies brought by the Greeks into Asia, Thrace, Italy, Sicily, and Africa, except Magnesia alone, which of them is not washed by the ocean? Thus a part of the Grecian shores seemed to be joined to the lands of the barbarians. For among the barbarians themselves, none were a maritime people, except the Etruscans and the Carthagenians; the one for the sake of commerce, the other for the sake of piracy. A most obvious cause of the evils and revolutions of Greece, arising from the vices of these maritime cities, which awhile ago I slightly touched upon. Nevertheless among these evils there is a great convenience. The products of every distant nation can be wafted to the city you inhabit; and in return the productions of your own lands can be sent or carried into whatever countries you choose. V. Who then more inspiredly than Romulus could secure all the maritime conveniences, and avoid all the defects? placing the city on the banks of a perennial river, broadly flowing with an equal course to the sea. By which the city might receive what it wanted from the ocean, and return whatever was superfluous. Receiving by the same channel all things essential to the wants and the refinements of life, not only from the sea, but likewise from the interior. So that it appears to me, he had foreseen this city, at some period, would be the seat and capital of a mighty empire: for a city placed in any other part of Italy would not easily have been able to acquire such a powerful influence.