The Historians' History of the World Author:Henry Smith Williams 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: CHAPTER I. LAND AND PEOPLE The fundamental peculiarity of Roman history is the fact that it is the history, not of a country or, in the proper sense, of ... more »a nation, but of a city. In Egypt, Thebes was at one time dominant, and Memphis at another; the supreme centre of Mesopotamia shifted between Babylon and Nineveh; whilst in Greece, Athens and Sparta long contested the supremacy. But in all these cases, with the possible exception of the Babylonian, the country as a whole gave its name to the people, and the city was, at best, only the heart of the civilisation; whereas Rome came into power as an isolated community within a little city, the very environs of which were at first hostile territory. This city chanced to be located in Italy, but for some centuries the names " Roman " and " Italian " were in no sense synonymous. Indeed at an early date the main part of Italy was inhabited by people who were not at all under Roman dominion, and when the legions of Rome issued forth to conquer the territories and the little peninsula, the wars that led to this result had all the significance of foreign conquest. And when these conquests had spread beyond the bounds of Italy proper until, finally, they took in practically all of the civilised world that was worth conquering, except the Parthian kingdom in the far East, it was still the single city on the Tiber which was regarded as constituting the essence of the vast dominion; and the citizen who had come to share in the full rights and privileges of this vast domain needed no other specific designation than the single word "Roman." From the point of view of the ethnologist, Greeks and Romans had strong points of difference. The Greeks were dominated by a temperament perhaps more acute and sensitive than that of any other nat...« less