geography of Italy, just as we must remember the political geography of
the peninsula in following Rome's territorial expansion. Let us think at
the outset, then, of a little strip of flat country on the Tiber, dotted
here and there with hills crowned with villages. Such hill towns were
Rome, Tusculum, and Præneste, for instance. Each of them was the
stronghold and market-place of the country immediately about it, and
therefore had a life of its own, so that although Latin was spoken in all
of them it varied from one to the other. This is shown clearly enough by
the inscriptions which have been found on the sites of these ancient
towns,[1] and as late as the close of the third century before our era,
Plautus pokes fun in his comedies at the provincialism of Præneste.

The towns which we have mentioned were only a few miles from Rome. Beyond
them, and occupying central Italy and a large part of southern Italy, were
people who spoke Oscan and the other Italic dialects, which were related
to Latin, and yet quite distinct from it. In the seaports of the south
Greek was spoken, while the Messapians and Iapygians occupied Calabria. To
the north of Rome were the mysterious Etruscans and the almost equally
puzzling Venetians and Ligurians. When we follow the Roman legions across
the Alps into Switzerland, France, England, Spain, and Africa, we enter a
jungle, as it were, of languages and dialects. A mere reading of the list
of tongues with which Latin was brought into contact, if such a list could
be drawn up, would bring weariness to the flesh. In the part of Gaul
conquered by Cæsar, for instance, he tells us that there were three
independent languages, and sixty distinct states, whose peoples doubtless
differed from one another in their speech. If we look at a map of the
Roman world under Augustus, with the Atlantic to bound it on the west, the
Euphrates on the east, the desert of Sahara on the south, and the Rhine
and Danube on the north, and recall the fact that the linguistic
conditions which Cæsar found in Gaul in 58 B.C. were typical of what