ROME: A HISTORICAL SURVEY.

The article presents a historical survey of Rome. The 5th and 4th centuries B.C., the period between the expulsion of the Etruscans and the wars that marked the entry of Rome into world politics, are the great formative period of Roman history. It is the age that forged the political and military organization that was to prove the strongest thing in the ancient world that was to break Carthage and the East and to realize at last the Hellenistic ideal of a world kingdom. Their history is hard to write, for they have left no material evidence of their culture, like the Etruscans, nor written records like their Hellenised descendants, who polished and rationalized and moralized the Roman historical tradition till it was transformed into literature. The origin of the Latin Confederation is one of the most controversial questions in Roman history. The traditional view held the Latin League to be of immemorial antiquity, and to have been under the presidency first of Alba Longa, and after the destruction of the latter, under that of Rome. Later historians have maintained that a league of this kind presupposes more advanced conditions than these that obtained among the Italian peoples of the early Iron Age, and that it could not have arisen before the period of early Greek and Etruscan influence.