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Rulers Of The South (2 Volumes) (Notable American Authors Series - Part I)
Rulers Of The South - 2 Volumes - Notable American Authors Series - Part I Author:F. Marion Crawford, Francis Marion Crawford Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: alive within them, the possession, body and soul, of a race that had mastered the only art they could never learn, the art of governing men ; and thereafter, rec... more »ognizing once and for always their position as a part of their conquerors' property, they worked for him and for Roman money as they had once laboured for glory and for themselves ; and in the slow decadence of genius in captivity, their supreme gifts were weakened by degrees, then scattered, and then lost. Henceforth the history of the south becomes for more than half a thousand years the story of the Romans, from the days of Appius Claudius who took Messina till after the times of Christian Constantine. The Romans The first Punic war, which was brought on by the appeal of the Mamertines to Rome, and lasted twenty- two years, was the turning-point in Roman history and the beginning of Rome's empire. The first Punic war means the conquest of Sicily, and since Rome held Messina and was in alliance with Syracuse, the struggle took place chiefly in the western and southern part of the island. It is no easy matter to sketch briefly a contest in which the winner lost seven hundred ships and an untold number of men ; it is impossible to condense into a few pages anything more than the shortest possible account of the principal battles fought, and thisI shall endeavour to do with as much clearness as the difficult nature of the subject admits, henceforth calling places by their Latin names or by their modern ones. The war opened slowly. For more than two hundred years Rome and Carthage had maintained towards one another an attitude of distrust without hostility, and when the two great powers were at last in open opposition for the possession of Sicily, they fenced and manoeuvred for some time, as if testing their relativ...« less