The struggle over privileges lasted for two hundred years. First the Canuleian law made marriage valid between patricians and plebeians, and instituted for a time military tribunes. The Licinian law, eighty years later, admitted plebeians to the consulship, and also required the employment of free labour in agriculture. The decisively democratic measure was the Horticunian law, after another seventy years, giving the exclusively plebeian assembly full legislative power. The practical effect of the changes was to create a new aristocracy, semi-plebeian in origin, and to reduce the personal power of the chief officers of state, while somewhat increasing that of the remodelled Senate; rendering it a body selfish indeed in internal matters, but essentially patriotic as well as powerful. _I.--The Description of Italy_ During the period of this long constitutional struggle, Rome and her kinsfolk had first been engaged in a stubborn and ultimately successful contest with the non-Aryan Etruscan race; and then Italy had been attacked by the migrating Aryan hordes of the Celts, known as Gauls, who sacked Rome, but retired to North Italy; events giving birth to many well-known stories, probably in the main mythical. But the practical effect was to impose a greater solidarity of the Latin and kindred races, and a more decisive acceptance of Roman hegemony. That hegemony, however, had to be established by persistent compulsion, and there were three stages in its completion. First, the subjection of the Latins and Campanians; then the struggle of Rome with the Umbrian-Samnites; finally, the decisive repulse of the Epirote invader Pyrrhus--in effect a Hellenic movement. The Roman supremacy established through the exhaustion of the valiant Samnites required to be confirmed by stern repression of attempts to recover liberty. But the Hellenic element in Italy, antagonistic to the growing Roman power, in effect invited the intervention of the Epirote chief. But his scheme was not that of an imperial statesman, but of a chivalrous and romantic warrior. His own political blunders and the iron determination of the Romans, destroyed his chances of conquest. His retirement left Rome undisputed lord of Italy; which in part shared full citizenship, in part possessed only the more restricted Latin rights, and in part only rights conceded under varying treaties. A sense of common Italian nationality was developing. But if Rome was queen of Italy, Carthage was queen of the seas. Maritime expansion was precluded, though Rome's position fitted her for it. Carthage was the one Phoenician state which developed political as well as commercial power. The commercial cities of North Africa were in subordination to her, in the Western Mediterranean she had no rivals, her domestic government was oligarchical.