ABSTRACT
About fifteen miles from its mouth the River Tiber winds through a group of hills which rise from the Latin plain. Here was the natural meeting-place of the Etruscans, Latins and Sabellians, and the objective of any ambitious people. Far enough from the sea to protect its inhabitants from the danger of piracy, the settlement which spread over these hills lay on the chief river of central Italy. It commanded both the Tiber valley, which gave access to Etruria and the central highlands, and a ford which lay south of an island in the Tiber; any traffic from north to south or from the eastern hills to the sea would pass through it. It was thus a natural centre and a point of distribution. 1 The hills themselves were well wooded, fairly precipitous and defensible; some were isolated, others formed spurs of a surrounding plateau. Though the ground between them was marshy and subject to flooding by the Tiber, the hills afforded some protection against disease, as well as against man and beast. Some, though not all, of the potential natural advantages of the future site of Rome must have been obvious to the earliest settlers.
