In late antiquity, Jewish communities were a common occurrence throughout Italy. Smaller centers and villages in the remoter parts of the Italian countryside became home to well-organized Jewish communities or to groups of Jewish families. The Jewish community of ancient Rome was among the oldest Jewish communities in Italy. A number of medieval legends traced the arrival of Jews in Spain to deep antiquity. The biblical Tarshish was often identified as Tartessus, and it was accepted that Jewish traders had traveled to Spain already under the Phoenicians and Carthaginians. Political loyalty was a recurring theme in the Visigothic period, partly because of the threat of internal rebellion and partly because of the stunning successes of Arab armies abroad. The theme of Jewish political treachery became critical under King Egica. Egica applied unprecedented economic pressures on the Jews in his realm.

The Romans had had state-to-state contacts, both friendly and unfriendly, with Greek communities and kings of the Greek world east of the Adriatic for many generations before the first trans-Adriatic military adventure in 229 BC. The Roman role was essentially passive; and this will doubtless have been the case also with the earliest friendly contacts with the Greek island of Rhodes about 305. This chapter discusses the Illyrian War between Rome and Greece. No far-reaching aspect of Roman foreign policy is affected by acceptance or rejection of the Acarnanian incident. The importance of the Straits of Otranto to Roman thinking and the limited aims of the war emerge from the course of events. During the 220s, Rome was seriously occupied in Italy by the Gallic invasion; and the Senate was also observing events in southern Spain, where the Carthaginians were successfully rebuilding their influence and power.

In the fifth century, Motya developed into a strongly-walled town, half of whose population was Greek and which conducted flourishing commerce with Elymians and Greeks. It became one of the key points of Carthaginian control over the narrow passage between Africa and Sicily, and the main naval base for Carthaginians in their wars against the Sicilians. The striking prosperity of sixth-century Selinus and Acragas speaks eloquently against the assumption that Malchus' 'long wars' in Sicily were waged against the Greeks. For this reason it has been very plausibly argued that his enemy may in fact have been Punics from Motya and elsewhere who tried to resist their mother-city's attempts to dominate them. Some frontier clashes between pro-Punic Selinus and the Acragantines may have served as a pretext for Gelon's propaganda. There is no better evidence of the vitality of Sicilian civilization in the first quarter of the fifth century than the swift rise of Acragas and Syracuse.