the British ship Endurance, captained by Sir Ernest Shackleton, set sail with twenty eight men to cross the Antarctic. This drawing up was the founding act of Roman law, the institutions of the Roman Republic and the mos maiorum. However, Pyrrhus was forced to leave Sicily in order to attend to business in southern Italy. In the 8th century BC, Greece began to emerge from the Dark Ages which followed the fall of the Mycenaean civilization. Literacy had been lost and Mycenaean script forgotten, but the Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet, modifying it to create the Greek alphabet. From the 9th century BC, the first Greek texts began to appear. Greece was divided into many small, self-governing communities, a pattern largely dictated by Greek geography: every island, valley