The Western World and Rome 255 city. But the citizens of tliese distant wards lost their votes rather than take the trouble to go up to the city to vote. While this steady expansion of Rome was going on, a tre- Gallic and mendous migration of Gauls inundated southern Europe. The ^^j-s; Rome Gauls were a vast group of Indo-European tribes extending ^^^^l^' across what is now France, from the English Channel to the Po in Italy valley in Italy. Their eastern tribes entered the Balkan Pen- insula and even pushed into Asia Minor.^ At one time they seemed about to overwhelm the nations on the north of the Mediterranean, as the Germans later did (p. 305). These in- vasions by the Gauls swept over the city of Rome after 400 B.C. and almost submerged it. Nevertheless the hardy city survived. The rivalry with the Samnites continued. These enemies in the south might win more than one battle, but they could not break down the stability of the State which the sagacious Roman Senate had welded together. Rival peoples, like the Samnites, lacked such a system, and furthermore they lacked such a city as Rome to serve as a nucleus and center of union. By 300 B.C. the lands absorbed by the Romans had quite enveloped the Samnites on east and west, and in the north likewise had carried the Roman boundaries far into Etruscan territory and well up the Tiber. Plence not even the combined assaults of -Etruscan . Samnite, and Gaul could exhaust the resources of the Roman State. When the Roman legions met the Gauls at Sentinum and overwhelm- ingly defeated them (295 B.C.), they won the supremacy of Italy for the city on the Tiber. Henceforth, unchallenged, Roman dominion in Italy was a matter of a short time. While the eastern empire of Alexander the Great was being cut up and parceled out by his Macedonian generals (p. 229), Italy was undergoing a process of stable consolidation which brought even the Greek cities in the south of the peninsula (see cut, p. 166) under Roman rule (272 B.C.). 1 The figure of the dying Gaul (see end of Chapter VIII, p. 214), once set up in Pergamum in 5.sia Minor (Fig. 101), represents one of the Gauls who invaded Asia Minor.
