Ravenna, A Study | Page 3

before that event, vague and obscure. But this at least may be said: it was first in the occupation of the Etruscans, who in time were turned out, destroyed, or enslaved by the Gauls, those invaders who crossed the Alps from the west and who during nearly two hundred years, continually, though never with an enduring success, invaded Italy, and in 388 B.C. actually captured the City. Rome, however, had by the year 223 B.C. succeeded in planting her fortresses at Placentia and Cremona and in fortifying Mutina (Modena), when suddenly in 218 B.C. Hannibal unexpectedly descended into the Cisalpine plain and destroyed all she had achieved. With his defeat, however, the conquest of Cisalpine Gaul was undertaken anew, and at some time after 183 B.C.--we do not know exactly when--the whole of this vast lowland country passed into Roman administration, to become the chief province of Caesar's great triple command, and one of the most valuable parts of the empire.
What, then, is the relation of this vast lowland country between the Alps and the Apennines to Italy proper? It stands as it has always stood to her as a great defence. For if, as we must, we consider Italy as the shrine, the sanctuary, and the citadel of Europe, a place apart and separate--and because of this she has been able to do her work both secular and religious--what has secured her but Cisalpine Gaul? The valley of the Po, all this vast plain, appears in history as the cockpit of Europe, the battlefield of the Celt, the Phoenician, the Latin, and the Teuton, of Catholic and Arian, strewn with victories, littered with defeats, the theatre of those great wars which have built up Europe and the modern world. If the Gauls had not been broken by the plain, they would perhaps have overwhelmed Italy and Rome; if Hannibal had found there enemies instead of friends, the Oriental would not so nearly have overthrown Europe. It broke the Gothic invasion, Attila never crossed it, it absorbed the worst of the appalling Lombard flood; Italy remains to us because of it.
Now since Cisalpine Gaul thus secured Italy, the entry from the one to the other, the road between them must always have been of an immense importance. That entry and that road, whenever they were in dispute, Ravenna commanded, and a good half of her importance lies in this.
I say whenever they were in dispute: in time of peace that road and that entry were not in the keeping of Ravenna but of Rimini.
A study of the map will show us that though the Apennines shut off Italy proper from Cisalpine Gaul along a line roughly from Genoa to Rimini, actually that difficult and barren range just fails to reach the Adriatic as it curves southward to divide the peninsula in its entire length into two not unequal parts. This failure of the mountains quite to reach the sea leaves at this corner a narrow strip of lowland, of marshy plain in fact, between them. Therefore the Romans, though they were compelled to cross the Apennines, for Rome lay upon their western side, were able to do so where they chose and not of necessity to make the difficult passage at a crucial point.
[Illustration: Sketch Map of Ravenna region]
The road they planned and laid out, the Flaminian Way, the great north road of the Romans, was built by Caius Flaminius the Censor about 220 B.C.[1], that is to say, immediately after the first subjection of the Gauls south of the Po which had been largely his achievement, and for military and political business which that achievement entailed. This road ran from Rome directly to Ariminum (Rimini) and it crossed the Apennines near the modern Scheggia and by the great pass of the Furlo.[2]
[Footnote 1: It is, of course, certain that a road was in existence long before; but not as a constructed, permanent, and military Way.]
[Footnote 2: The Furlo was to be held in the time of Aurelius Victor, if not of Vespasian, by the fortress of Petra Pertusa.]
The first act of the Romans after the defeat of Hannibal was the re-establishment of their fortresses at Placentia, Cremona, and Mutina (Modena), the second was the construction of a great highway which connected Placentia through Mutina with the Via Flaminia at Rimini. This was the work of the Consul Aemilius Lepidus in 187 B.C. and the road still bears his name.
It is obvious then that the command of the way from Italy into Cisalpine Gaul, or vice versa, lay in the hands of Rimini, and it is significant that the political boundary between them was here marked by a little river, the Rubicon, a few miles to the north of that city. The command which Rimini thus held was purely political;