The history of Roma is commonly treated in three great divisions corresponding to the different forms of government which prevailed –the Monarchy, the Republic and the Empire–. These main divisions may be subdivided in different ways. Mommsen, whose great history reaches only down to the fall of the republic, divides his work into five periods. Of these, the first stretches from the earliest times down to the abolition of the kingship. The ancient historians have a good deal to tell us of this period, the names and characters, for instance, of the seven kings, beginning with Romulus, who is said to have founded the city in the year 753 B.C., and ending with Tarquinius Superbus, whose tyrannical conduct led to the abolition of the monarchy. In modern times, however, most of what the ancient historians have to tell us about the regal period is discredited. They all of them lived long after the events the regal period is described, in an age when the sifting of evidence was not considered the historian's chief duty, and it is thought now that much of what they wrote down as history of the earliest times is, as regards detail, no more authentic than the story of King Alfred and the burnt cakes. The tradition on which they built is nevertheless valuable for all conjectures concerning the general conditions prevailing in the earliest days of Rome.
The next of Mommsen's periods runs from the abolition of the monarchy (traditional date 510 B.C.) until the unification of Italy. When she first appears in history, Rome is a small city-state, but already occupies a pre-eminent position in the confederation of kindred city-states known as the Latin League. The relationship between Rome and her confederates was not always that of peace, but in the wars against the Latins it was Rome who was finally successful, as she was also, but only after centuries of hard fighting, against the other nations of Italy. The last great war of this period was one in which the Greek city of Tarentum in South Italy (where there were many Greek colonies) was allied with a non-Italian power in the person of Pyrrhus, king of Epirus. With the final defeat of Pyrrhus in 275 B.C., the conquest of Italy was virtually complete. Roman colonies (1) had been planted at most of the points of strategic importance, and of her late enemies, some were forced to accept direct Roman rule, while others were bound by treaties in which Rome was so much the predominant partner that they were, in fact, under her dominion. They could have no treaties with other foreign states and were bound to supply contingents to serve with the Roman armies.
