hole dug, and there deposited some fruits and a handful of earth brought
from Roman soil; then yoking to a plough, having a copper share, a white
bull and a white heifer, they marked out by a furrow a large enclosure.
The rest followed, flinging within the line the ridges thrown up by the
plough. When the line was finished, the bull and the heifer were
sacrificed with due pomp. It was a Roman colony come to settle at Sena,
on the very site of the chief town of those Senonic Gauls who had been
conquered and driven out. Fifteen years afterwards another Roman colony
was founded at Ariminum (Rimini), on the frontier of the Bolan Gauls.
Fifty years later still two others, on the two banks of the Po, Cremona
and Placentia (Plaisance). Rome had then, in the midst of her enemies,
garrisons, magazines of arms and provisions, and means of supervision and
communication. Thence proceeded at one time troops, at another
intrigues, to carry dismay or disunion amongst the Gauls.

Towards the close of the third century before our era, the triumph of
Rome in Cisalpine Gaul seemed nigh to accomplishment, when news arrived
that the Romans' most formidable enemy, Hannibal, meditating a passage
from Africa into Italy by Spain and Gaul, was already at work, by his
emissaries, to insure for his enterprise the concurrence of the
Transalpine and Cisalpine Gauls. The Senate ordered the envoys they had
just then at Carthage to traverse Gaul on returning, and seek out allies
there against Hannibal. The envoys halted amongst the Gallo-Iberian
peoplets who lived at the foot of the eastern Pyrenees. There, in the
midst of the warriors assembled in arms, they charged them in the name of
the great and powerful Roman people, not to suffer the Carthaginians to
pass through their territory. Tumultuous laughter arose at a request
that appeared so strange. "You wish us," was the answer, "to draw down
war upon ourselves to avert it from Italy, and to give our own fields
over to devastation to save yours. We have no cause to complain of the