Capua, in the rich volcanic plain of Campania,
had far greater advantages in the way of natural wealth; but Capua was
too far south, in a more enervating climate, and virility was never
one of her strong points. Corfinium, in the heart of the Apennines,
once seemed threatening to become a rival, and was for a time the
centre of a rebellious confederation; but this city was too near the
east coast--an impossible position for a pioneer of Italian dominion.
Italy looks west, not east; almost all her natural harbours are on her
western side; and though that at Ostia, owing to the amount of silt
carried down by the Tiber, has never been a good one, it is the only
port which can be said to command an entrance into the centre of the
peninsula.
No one, however, would contend that the position of Rome is an ideal
one. Taken in and by itself, without reference to Italy and the
Mediterranean, that position has little to recommend it. It is too far
from the sea, nearly twenty miles up the valley of a river with an
inconveniently rapid current, to be a great commercial or industrial
centre; and such a centre Rome has never really been in the whole
course of her history.
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