THE HISTORY OF OLD ROME

II. From the Abolition of the Monarchy in Rome to the Union of Italy

From: The History of Rome, by Theodor Mommsen
Translated with the sanction of the author by William Purdie Dickson

CHAPTER VII - Struggle between Pyrrhus and Rome, and Union of Italy

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Page 3

The only relations established were of a mercantile kind; as in the instance of the free state of Rhodes, the leading representative of the policy of commercial neutrality in Greece and in consequence the universal medium of intercourse in an age of perpetual wars, which about 448 concluded a treaty with Rome --a commercial convention of course, such as was natural between a mercantile people and the masters of the Caerite and Campanian coasts.

Even in the supply of mercenaries from Greece, the universal recruiting field of those times, to Italy, and to Tarentum in particular, political relations--such as subsisted, for instance, between Tarentum and Sparta its mother-city--exercised but a very subordinate influence.

In general the raising of mercenaries was simply a matter of traffic, and Sparta, although it regularly supplied the Tarentines with captains for their Italian wars, was by that course as little involved in hostilities with the Italians, as in the North American war of independence the German states were involved in hostilities with the Union, to whose opponents they sold the services of their subjects.

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