CHAPTER XVIII

THE CONQUEST OF CENTRAL ITALY

I.

THE ROMAN TRADITION

THE preceding chapter has described the recovery of Rome from the Gallic disaster. We have now to trace the events which secured to Rome dominance in central Italy. The issue was placed beyond doubt. When the period ends, the Latins had ceased to be equal allies, the Samnites to be equal rivals or enemies, the Gauls were no longer a danger, and the Greeks only waited for a master. So much is certain. But the historian is ill served by the records of these stormy times. Apart from the scanty notices found in Diodorus, the fragments of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, of Dio Cassius and of Appian’s Samnite Wars, and the entries in the Fasti triumphales, he has nothing but the account in Livy, and, since Niebuhr, few will deny that there is much in Livy’s narrative that is not true. The fact that the later annalists added much, some true, some false, to the jejune records which served as the earlier stratum of Roman history-writing needs no further proof: what concerns us here is to discover what forms are taken by the admixture of the false in the external history of this period, so that we may endeavour to isolate and remove it.

The period is one in which the new nobility of office was rising to power. Since 366 plebeian nobles had the right to be consuls and to be independent commanders of armies in the field. But the older patrician houses, above all the Fabii, had not lost their prestige; and when in the next three centuries the Roman annalists composed the history of this period they had to satisfy the claims of the new pride of the new nobles and the old pride of the old. Both old and new nobles held office; it was an age of wars; and it hardly can have seemed invention to attribute to these magistrates victories which they ought to have won. One partial check is the list of triumphs, which, for the latter part of the period at least, may rest on some kind of official records. Any Roman victory of this period described in the literary sources which is not attested by the Fasti triumphales, must be suspected as fictitious, unimportant, or really a defeat transmuted by the alchemy of family pride. Real victories may be duplicated, either by reason of alternative attributions to members of a family or poverty of imagination on the part of fabricators. And yet: it is naive to deny the possibility that in the shapeless warfare of repetition to which Roman campaigns were often reduced, a son might imitate his father in defeating Samnites or Etruscans, or even, in two consulships, win two victories on the same border. For Roman wars in this period had intervals of what was little more than border-warfare, in which small victories with small if any results were not uncommon, and towns were taken or retaken with a casual frequency. But here if scepticism may remove something that is true, it removes little that is other than unimportant.

A further source of falsification is patriotism and the civic pride born of prosperity. The Samnites were tough enemies who exacted from the Romans the homage of mendacity. Defeats which could not be denied, which were perhaps preserved by the enemies of the defeated generals, are hastily repaired by resounding victories which we have the right to suspect. The enemies of Rome are thought of as rebels or treaty-breakers; or if the Romans are the aggressors, Rome has on her side either the spirit or the letter of the bargains which she seems to break. And finally, there are the exaggeration of numbers, the use of conventional battle-pieces to describe battles, the precipitate of old or recent hostilities between noble families, and the dramatic and ethical instinct of historians whose pre-occupation was to point a moral or adorn a tale.

Such are the motives and methods of falsification which most affect the tradition even of this period, which approaches the light of contemporary record, and statements which lie beyond their scope claim especial attention and may often be a touchstone of truth. The elogia of the Roman nobles did preserve true details, as of the capture of obscure towns, and when these are mentioned in the tradition we may give them some credence, but it is to be remembered that the exploits may be wrongly assigned to the several stages of a general’s career. Sometimes, too, it is not possible to discover where the places were. A Roman general may even by the destruction of a town have destroyed the one means of evaluating his exploit. Acts of state, as treaties, are not lightly to be disregarded, for the record of them for this period may have been preserved by contemporary archives. Roman magistrates used their houses as their offices, and the archives of the great nobles could eke out the scanty records of the state. Equally authentic may be the notices of the founding of colonies which, serving as they did the ends of strategy, are landmarks in the progress of Roman arms. Finally, a study of the terrain and of the  strategical problems solved in other wars in central Italy, may indicate the probable effect of operations, though they tempt us to attribute to the Roman Senate too logical and too far-reaching aims. Strategy which has to rely on local knowledge rather than on the use of maps, is apt to be fumbling at first, and at last traditional rather than imaginative.

II.

THE GROUPING OF POWERS

By the middle of the fourth century, as has been said above, the horizon of Rome was widening, and we have to review the grouping of powers in the Italian peninsula at this moment. Forces beyond the control, often perhaps beyond the knowledge, of the Romans had been unconsciously preparing the way for Rome’s hegemony of Italy. In the first half of the fifth century the richest and most formidable peoples in Italy were the Etruscans and Greeks. It is true that Rome and the Latins had asserted their independence of Etruscan political influence, but the Etruscans had found more than compensation in the mastery of the country between the Apennines and the Po. The Greeks of Sicily, with little to fear from the Carthaginians after the crowning mercy of Himera, had only to find union among themselves and to join hands with their kinsmen in Magna Graecia to make themselves masters of the southern half of the peninsula. But, as we have seen, the Greeks could not unite, they found no great leader, and their opportunity passed unused. In the second half of the fifth century the expansion of the Italic peoples of the Apennines thrust the Greeks back upon the defensive and robbed the Etruscans of their last remnant of power south of the Tiber.

The cause of this great movement of the Sabellian peoples was beyond doubt the progressive over-population of the mountain country, which found its remedy in the strange practice of the ver sacrum, by which dedicated bands of emigrants left their homes to take to themselves the homes of others. The early stages of this process escape our knowledge. We may see its by-products in the raids on Latium of the Aequi, who were both impelled and weakened by the greater movements behind them. The set of the movement was southwards. In the north and north-west, the military skill of the Etruscans held their plains intact; in the east the sturdy Picentes could maintain themselves and their civilization which from the sixth century onwards was enriched by imports from the Greeks of southern Italy. Their pugnacity, attested by the weapons which fill their graves, did good service to Italy in resistance to the Gauls. Picenum was the glacis of the Italian defences. But they were no less and for far longer a check on a northern Sabellian advance. Rome and Latium were screened by their neighbours, and the Sabellians pressed on southwards from glen to glen until they found themselves within reach of the fertile plain of Campania. Here was an ancient population, known to the Greeks as Ausones, enjoying a civilization planted there by the Etruscans and by the Greeks, especially of Cumae, who since Hiero’s victory in 474 BC had been undisputed masters of the coast. The Etruscans had no longer the seapower nor the ambition to re-assert themselves in the south, and the Syracusans were immersed in Sicilian politics. In 445 Capua was taken by the Sabellians to whom the Greeks gave the name of ’Ottikoi—Oscans, and in 428, Cumae, the oldest Greek settlement in Italy, met the same fate1. Neapolis, the offshoot of Cumae, alone remained to shelter Cumaean refugees and to stand for Hellenism. Thus there was interposed an Italic barrier against any Greek advance northwards in western Italy. Content with their conquest, the Oscans in Campania turned aristocrats, learned the use of cavalry, and, played upon by Greek influences and Etruscan traditions, rapidly absorbed the civilization which they found waiting for them.

A further stage in the Sabellian progress was the occupation by the Lucanians of what the Greeks called Oenotria: the area dominated by the Lucanians is roughly bounded by the Silarus on the north, the Bradanus on the east, and by a line drawn west of Thurii on the south. The coasts of this region were, in the main, still held by the Greeks of Posidonia, Pyxus, Scidrus, Laus, and, on the south-east, Metapontum, though they probably lost most of their territory and sometimes their independence. As in Campania, so here, though in less measure, the Sabellians absorbed the culture which they found, a culture which, like that in Apulia, borrowed largely from the Greeks.

By 390 the Lucanians had formed a league which was encouraged by Dionysius I in order to weaken the Greek cities of southern Italy. That opportunist tyrant secured the safety of Hellenism in Sicily by sacrificing the future of Hellenism in Italy. Magna Graecia was left to find a leader in Tarentum, whose tortuous policies sought to protect herself from the barbarians by alien adventurers and from alien adventurers by ingratitude. The natural allies of the Greeks were the Daunians of Apulia who had to guard their plains from these new invaders, but their old fears of Tarentum restricted them to a fairly successful defence. The remaining peoples of the south, in Calabria and Bruttium, had little political significance, save that in the second half of the fourth century the Bruttians began to press hard on their Greek neighbours.

Meanwhile the southern Apennines had once more filled up with Sabellians, who now formed the loose confederation which the Romans called the Samnites. The extent of the Samnite league about the middle of the fourth century is marked out by the periplus of the pseudo-Scylax. It stretched across the width of the peninsula touching the sea on the west between Campania and Posidonia (Paestum), on the east a strip of coast from Garganus 36 hours sail northward. Thus it included the north of Apulia and the canton of the Frentani. Their kinsmen of the Lucanian league were independent of it, as were the Oscans of Campania and the lesser Sabellian tribes of the high Apennines, the Paeligni, Marsi, Marrucini, with their outliers the Vestini. Much remains to be done in the discovery of the civilization which they enjoyed, but it is roughly true to say that these lesser Apennine peoples lagged behind the dwellers in Latium and the south and still more behind the Campanians and the Etruscans1. With slight economic resources they could not attract to themselves the wares of the more advanced peoples. Politically weak, they lived isolated from each other, offering little inducement to a conqueror, possessing little power to make conquests. With the Sabines and the Umbrians they form what may be called a neutral area in central Italy.

In the north, the invasion of the Gauls had broken the Etruscan power beyond the Apennines, and even when their raids were intermitted they remained an incalculable danger against which the states of central Italy had to find protection. Thus Rome and the Samnites, recognizing the presence of a common enemy, had made an alliance in 354 whereby it would seem they agreed to respect the allies of each other. As the Gallic pressure became less severe, each of the two contracting powers found secondary reasons for maintaining their alliance, the Romans in the incipient movement of secession among the Latins, the Samnites in the complicated politics of southern Italy. There is no reason to credit the Samnites with any profound policy, and the Roman Senate were more noteworthy for a clear realization of what lay before their doors than for any far-sighted designs. But once the alliance had served its primary and secondary purposes, it was almost inevitably bound to turn to enmity or rivalry, for the natural sphere into which both peoples might extend their power most profitably was the Campanian plain. In the generations covered by this chapter Rome solved the problems that presented themselves, and in their solution attained predominance in central Italy, and built up most of the great federation which was soon to control the whole peninsula.

III.

ROME AND THE LATINS.

In 358 the Latins had acquiesced in a renewal of the treaty which bound them to Rome, accepting for the moment the fait accompli of Roman predominance. The Volscians, it is true, were not entirely subdued, and remained a possible ally for any Latins who might attempt secession. They had been driven off most of the plains which lay to the west of them, and the Romans had settled there the two tribes Pomptina and Poplilia. On the other hand, the raids of the Gauls, as has been said, had made for the spirit of Italian solidarity. Rome, the martyr and defender of the Italic peoples, had the moral advantage of having withstood the Gauls instead of using them, as had some of the recalcitrant . The alliance of Romewith the Samnites in 354 set a barrier which protected the peoples of central and southern Italy from the Gauls, even if it was to end in their subjection to one or other of the two high contracting powers.

Finally, in 348 the Romans made a treaty with Carthage, which revived in a modified form the agreement made more than a century and a half earlier.

The pre-occupation of Carthage was to preserve her monopoly of trade in the western Mediterranean, especially in Spain, and the Senate, faced by pressing political problems nearer home, was prepared to sacrifice the slight interest which Rome possessed in overseas trade and the larger interests of her ally, Massilia. In return for the Roman acceptance of exclusion from these waters the Carthaginians renounced any intention of gaining a foothold in Latium and recognized it as the Roman sphere of interest. The treaty reveals the Roman intention to secure the permanent control of the coast from the Tiber to Tarracina and was a threat to Antium, which was at once a home of pirates and an outlet for the Volscians. The threat was soon translated into action. Two years after the treaty the Romans made war on the Volscians, and M. Valerius Corvus, the most notable Roman general of the day, celebrated a triumph over the Antiates, the Volscians and the men of Satricum. We may agree with the Roman annalists in suspecting that this was a preventive war intended to weaken the Volscians before the Latins were able to give help or ready to receive it. The treaty reveals more than this intention; it appears to revive the claim to dominate Latium which Rome had successfully asserted in the closing years of the regal period. Ten years before the treaty a movement of the older and more powerful Latin cities to break away from Rome had failed, but a new conflict was inevitable as it became more and more clear that Rome intended to be not the leader but the mistress of Latium. It is true that the terms which refer to Italy, as given by Polybius , are elusive, whether because of the silences of the historian, who is chiefly concerned to stress the rights claimed by the Carthaginians, or because the Roman Senate preferred formulae of which their power would be the interpreter. But we may suspect that the Latins saw in it a treaty made for them and about them in which their interests were at once neglected and threatened.

Thus Roman ambitions and anxieties combined with Latin fears to govern the course of the Republic’s policy. To judge by later events, the Latin element in some of the so-called Latin colonies was gaining the upper hand, and by the year 343 the Latins are found pursuing a military policy of their own independent of Rome. The older annalistic tradition ascribes to this and the next year an internal crisis at Rome which was probably both political and economic, though we have few details that we can trust. This crisis may well have given the Latins freedom of action to prepare for the movement of secession which soon followed. In one quarter Rome might feel secure, that is, in the north. The southern Etruscans kept the treaty of 351, and in 343 Rome turned her forty years truce with Falerii into a definite pact of alliance. This shows that Rome was preparing to face her dangers to the south. It is equally clear that it was not in the interest of Rome to do anything which would dissolve her treaty with the Samnites and augment a present danger.

It is at this point that the Roman tradition1 interposes a First Samnite War which Rome is alleged to have fought in order to protect the Campanians, who by surrender (deditio) to Rome made themselves in the nick of time part and parcel of the Roman state. The details of this war as given in Livy notoriously abound in military improbabilities, but that fact does not of itself prove that no war happened, nor is it safe to deduce from the silence of Diodorus that the war was not recorded in the older annalistic tradition on which he drew, for he is capricious in selecting for record incidents of Roman history. It is true that when later he does speak of Romans fighting Samnites, his phrasing suggests that he is describing the first war which Rome waged against that enemy, but his methods of historiography hardly entitle us to press that deduction very far. But, once suspicion is aroused, it is impossible to evade the thought that the whole story attributes to Rome uncharacteristic folly and is inconsistent with other elements in the Roman tradition which seem less open to question. That Rome should have chosen a moment when she was embarrassed by well-founded suspicions of the Latins to break with the Samnites for the beaux yeux of the Campanians, whose loyal support she did not win by her intervention, argues political folly only equalled by the military foolhardiness of fighting a war in Campania with no sure communications between Rome and her armies. If the war is fictitious, a motive for the invention can readily be found in the desire to provide Rome with a moral justification for her dealings with Campania in the Latin War. At that time, as we shall see, Rome granted to the Campanians civitas sine suffragio and a generation which conceived of that as a penalty might well seek to prove ingratitude as the crime. The argument that there must have been a war of Romans and Campanians against Samnites, as otherwise there would be no Roman-Campanian connection to be broken when the Campanians joined the rebellious Latins, is ‘petitio principii’ for this connection may be as fictitious as the war which led to it. Certainty is impossible, but respect for the artificial Roman tradition about this period should not compel a cautious critic to postulate folly in the Romans, blindness in the Latins, a short memory for benefits in the Campanians and a short memory for injuries in the Samnites. If this war is eliminated, the tradition presents us with what follows, a narrative which is probably true and certainly credible, and to that narrative we may now return.

In 343 the Latin armies were already in the field, though apparently not yet prepared to challenge Rome directly, but according to a statement in Livy which deserves credence so long as no good reason can be discovered for its invention, they attacked the Paeligni. A successful advance in the Apennines would drive a wedge between Rome and the Samnites without bringing either power directly into the field. The internal troubles at Rome, which a direct attack might have ended, presumably prevented any counterstroke, but subsequent operations suggest that the Latin enterprise had little success. To meet this threat the Romans drew closer their bond with the Samnites by renewing in 341 the treaty of 354 and by making it clear that they did not regard the territory of the Sidicini south of Latium as covered by it from a Samnite attack. The result was that the Sidicini appealed to the Latins, and a Latin army marched across the Samnite border. Thus the Latins gained one ally and very soon added to themselves another, the Oscans of the league of Capua; and the remainder of the year 341 was spent in preparations for a war against Rome and Samnium.

The forces were not unequal. The Latins were long used to match man for man with Rome, the Volscians and Sidicini were hardy men of the hills, while the Campanians—for so the Romans called the league of Capua—could bring into the field besides the infantry of their populous cities cavalrymen mounted on the spirited little horses which are depicted on their funeral monuments. But they were less formidable than they seemed to be, for the recruiting agents of Carthage and Sicilian tyrants had for nearly a century drained Campania of its more adventurous soldiers. On the other hand, Rome had enjoyed a respite from serious wars and had in the Samnites formidable allies. But the attention of these last was in part distracted by the enterprises of the Spartan king Archidamus in southern Italy, and, besides, there was between the Roman nobility and the democratic Samnites little sympathy. Their alliance had first been against the Gauls: that danger was past for the time and the natural antagonism of plain and hill was likely to make them enemies so soon as they ceased to be allies.

The struggle was short but severe. The Latins, according to Livy, demanded full Roman citizenship and a half share in the government of Rome. The whole narrative seems to be a rhetorical retrojection of the antecedents of the Social War and it is more probable that the Latins declared their intention of going their own way or of asserting the ancient equality of their League with Rome. Whatever the demand, it was refused and war was declared. In the spring of 340, while one consul Decius Mus presumably covered Rome1, his colleague T. Manlius marched through the country of the Paeligni and joined hands with the northern Samnites. The junction which the Latin expedition of 343 had sought to make impossible was now a fact. The allied army marched down the Liris, met the forces of the Latins and their allies in the plain near Suessa Aurunca, and defeated them in a great battle at Trifanum. The patriotic Roman tradition has reduced the Samnites to the role of spectators, but we need not doubt that they played their share in achieving victory. The fruits of victory were gathered by the Romans. They hastened to make a separate peace with the Campanians, offering them very favourable terms, which the nobles of Capua, who perhaps had already intrigued with Rome and behaved badly in the battle, were willing enough to accept. Rome had thus anticipated her allies in gaining control of the fertile plain of the Volturnus and could leave to them a less valuable prize, the Sidicini. The Latins and Volscians, reduced to their own resources, resisted for two more years, but in 338 the leaders of the northern group of Latin towns, Pedum and Tibur, were defeated by L. Furius Camillus, while his colleague C. Maenius crushed the southern Latins and the Volscians in a battle south of Antium. Antium itself was forced to surrender and the prows of its small fleet adorned the Comitium at Rome. The arms and diplomacy of Rome had triumphed, and she turned to consolidate her position against a conflict with her Samnite allies, who had served her turn and were now to be her dupes or her enemies.

IV.

THE NEW ROMAN POWER

In the settlement which followed the Latin War Rome had three main objects, the first to render impossible a second concerted Latin rising while leaving unimpaired the fighting strength of her old allies, the second to reduce the Volscians finally to harmlessness, the third to attach to herself by strong bonds of common interest the Campanian communities and the people of the coast-road south from Latium.

To the achievement of these objects of high policy desire for revenge or for land were strictly subordinated. Rome indeed behaved with that calculated moderation which inspired her sagacious leaders parcere subiectis. The Latin colonies, Ardea, Circeii, Setia, Signia, Norba, Sutrium and Nepete, which had no ancient tradition of independence, were left as they were. Tibur and Praeneste, both strong cities, were mulcted of some territory but otherwise retained their alliances with Rome. Cora remained formally an independent ally of Rome as before. By a yet bolder stroke of enlightened self-interest Rome conferred her complete franchise on Lanuvium, Aricia, Nomentum and Pedum, which became integral parts of the Roman state1. The same right was conferred on Tusculum, unless it had already been granted in 381. Thus the Roman state received an access of full citizens, and, before a generation had passed, a Tusculan noble, L. Fulvius, attained the Roman consulship (322 BC). It was annexation, but annexation to privileges as well as to burdens. In 332 two new tribes, Maecia and Scaptia, were formed in Latium. The old Latin cities and Latin colonies which were not thus granted citizenship were deprived of commercium and conubium, with each other and of the right of concerting political action. Although the ancient common worship of Juppiter Latiaris on the Alban Mount and the Feriae Latinae continued, the congresses at the Caput Ferentinae were ended. On the other hand the peoples of these communities retained commercium and conubium with Roman citizens, who now composed the half of Latium.

The Volscians were held back in their hills by the sending of Roman colonists to Antium and to Satricum. The anti-Roman leaders in Velitrae were driven into exile and their lands confiscated for the benefit of Roman settlers who retained their citizenship. But Velitrae did not become wholly Roman and, not long after, was still using a Sabellian dialect. For the moment these measures seem to have sufficed, the more, perhaps, as action against the northern Volscians might have brought the Roman armies near the middle Liris, which was debatable ground between Latium and the Samnites. The Hernici, farther north, appear to have remained quiescent or on the side of Rome, but they had ceased to be of great importance.

Finally, it remained to bind fast to Rome the coast peoples south of Latium and the towns in the lower Volturnus valley. Livy declares that the people of Fundi, Formiae, Capua, Cumae and Suessula were granted the Roman citizenship sine suffragio, i.e. without the rights of voting or holding office in the Roman state. There is no cogent reason against accepting this statement, which most probably goes back to an official record. The limitation of the franchise would have little meaning for most of these people, and though they were involved in wars without the power of deciding about them, this was at least balanced by the fact that Rome could not leave them to the mercy of their mountain neighbours. Livy says that the Capuan Knights received the full Roman franchise, but this is possibly a confusion with later events, and the Roman Fasti show no certain instance of a Campanian noble holding office at Rome during the century which followed this settlement. The burdens of citizenship were light enough. To judge from the wars which followed, the Campanian levies both of foot and horse were usually left to their own management, and inscriptions show that Capua continued to be an Oscan city governed by its own Oscan magistrates. And yet, if a Capuan or a Formian went to Latium, he found himself in enjoyment of all the private rights of a Roman citizen.

Despite the wars which followed the adhesion of the Campanians to Rome, they gained in security. On the paintings which adorned their tombs we have evidence of the luxurious variety of their lives. We see gaily dressed cavaliers—mounted hoplites or light cavalry—with their plumed helmets and cloaks, going out to war or returning on victory with the spoils of their enemies dangling from their lances. Their womenfolk are depicted sitting among luxurious gear, spruce, dignified and house-proud. At funerals they had combats of gladiators who wore the characteristic armour of the mountain Samnites and were probably prisoners of war. While the origin of gladiatorial fights may be Etruscan it is at least probable that the custom reached Rome by way of Campania. They bought and imitated Greek vases, but in their tomb-paintings we see an art which rapidly became truly ‘Oscan’, national in character, more realistic than the Greek, untainted by the cruelty and gloom which at this time dominated the art of Etruria. The Roman tradition saw in the Campanians luxurious weaklings, but after all, during decades of social intercourse Campania repaid its debt to Roman strength by helping to bring some brightness into the lives of its protectors. The Appian Way was to bring Campanian civilization near to Rome as well as Roman legions near to Capua. The true Italian vein of humour which the Romans did not lack was reinforced from Campania. If Etruria must be credited with the sophisticated professional performer of mime or music and perhaps with the biting satire of the Fescennine songs, it is Atelia in Campania that gave its name to the more good-humoured farces in which the young Romans found vent for their high spirits. The manufactures of Campania reached the Roman market and made good many deficiencies of Roman industry and, by the time of the elder Cato, supplied tools for Roman agriculture. We must not exaggerate their prosperity—the heyday of Pompeian prosperity was not yet—but it cannot be doubted that the adhesion of Campania to Rome brought at least material benefit to both.

In practice then there was between Rome and the Campanians a connection giving rather more security but rather less freedom than an alliance, yet sufficiently resembling an alliance to carry with it no stigma of inferiority, and this experiment of Roman statecraft was justified by its results. Some land, perhaps the estates of anti-Roman notables, was confiscated and used for citizen settlements, in which Campanians could share, and it is possible that special rights were granted to the loyal Capuan aristocrats. The league of which Capua had been head was dissolved in the larger unity of the Roman state so that inhabitants of Cumae or Suessula now had the same rights as those of Capua. Not long afterwards (332) the people of Acerrae were also made cives sine suffragio. Such was the group of states bound to Rome  by old and new ties of sentiment or interest, at the head of which Rome made her bid for the hegemony of central Italy.

V.

ROMAN POLICY AND THE SAMNITES

Rome now controlled a long strip of territory which at several points was dominated by hills which might harbour enemies. During the ten years which followed the defeat of the Latins, the Romans were concerned to find means of protection. To secure the Capuan plain from attacks from the country of the Sidicini, they established in 334 a strong colony at Cales, thus putting a limit to Samnite expansion in that quarter. The Samnites might have intervened to prevent this, but they were kept busy by the enterprise of Alexander of Epirus. Their forbearance was ill-rewarded, for when the Samnites and Lucanians suffered a defeat at Posidonia, the Romans hastened to come to an agreement with Alexander which bound them to friendly neutrality and removed the danger that the king and his Greek allies would attempt to advance north into the Campanian plain.

The next step for Rome was to master the Volscian hills which looked down on the Pomptine plain. Accordingly, in 329 the armies of the Republic were sent against Privernum, the town was taken, its walls destroyed and, as at Velitrae, the leaders of the anti-Roman party were exiled beyond the Tiber. Privernum was granted the Roman franchise sine suffragio, and part of its territory was confiscated. Some ten years later, in the interval of peace which followed the Caudine disaster, this was constituted a Roman tribe, the Oufentina. In the same year, 329, a Roman colony was planted at Tarracina (Anxur) to hold the coast road where it passes by Lautulae, the Thermopylae of southern Latium. Perhaps as preparation for the attack on Privernum, the Romans allied themselves with Fabrateria (Vetus), the modern Ceccano, in the Trerus valley and possibly with Frusino on the high ground to the north of it. This brought the Romans close to the Samnite border and to the north-western end of the fertile plain of the middle Liris. Here was at once the possibility of annexation and of the further protection of the Roman possessions, and in 328 the Romans founded a colony at Fregellae, which blocked the north-western entrance to this plain.

The course of Roman policy is clear and consequent, but in the next year it was diverted by a crisis in Campania. West of Capua lay the strong Greek city of Neapolis, which a century before had received the refugees from its parent Cumae when that city fell into the hands of the Oscans. To Neapolis Cumae had been the ‘old city’ and it may be conjectured that the refugees formed a section of the population which was locally known as the ‘old citizens,’ Palaeopolitai. Within the city grew up two opposed parties, with one of which the ‘old citizens’ were identified, and these two parties found support, the one in Capua the other in the Oscan town of Nola. The latter won the upper hand, and a garrison of Samnite mercenaries was introduced into Neapolis to support the regime of the ‘old citizens’ party. The result was friction with Capua, which in 327 called on Rome for help; this was promptly given. While one consular army covered the siege, the other under Q. Publilius Philo blockaded the town. It was too strong to be taken by storm and could not be starved while the sea was open. The siege dragged on into the next year and Publilius Philo was continued in office as proconsul to conduct it. The choice was wise, for Publilius seems to have been a diplomatist, and intrigue was to solve the problem. But this diplomatist proconsul was the first of a long line of proconsular soldiers destined to serve and finally to end senatorial government. The Romans might have sought naval help from their allies the Carthaginians but may have shrunk from bringing them into a strong city. Under pressure of the siege and perhaps of this possibility the government of Neapolis passed into the hands of the pro-Romans Charilaus and Nymphius, who tricked the Samnite garrison into evacuating the town and then surrendered it to the besiegers. The Romans made an ally of Neapolis, which remained faithful to her new protectors. The Capuans had no cause to complain, and Capua and Neapolis prospered side by side for a century.

We may now, on the eve of the great Samnite War, review the military problem imposed on Rome by the nature of her enemy and of her enemy’s country. The Samnites had developed an art of war well suited to their hills. They did not fight in phalanxes but in smaller bands, perhaps the model of the Roman maniple as a tactical unit. Their weapons were a short stabbing sword or (possibly later) a falchion and the heavy casting spear, the pilum. They carried a large shield, oblong or oval, and wore a greave on the left leg to protect themselves from their shields as well as from the enemy. The greater part of Samnium proper is ill adapted to cavalry, and the strength of the Samnites lay in their footsoldiers, who combined the mobility of light troops with a steadiness which matched that of the Roman legionaries. To face these formidable mountaineers the Romans opposed an army which manoeuvred in close formations. The Romans had no cavalry proper but rather mounted infantry. In the open country the Romans were competent enough, and doubtless they had learnt from the great disaster at the Allia1. But the fact that they took so long to subdue the Aequi and Volscians, although they defeated them when they could intercept them on the plains, suggests that the Roman army was not well adapted for mountain warfare. They had numbers on their side, and their alliance with the Campanians gave them cavalry to which they added new formations of their own. They could thus make headway on the plains against the valour of the Samnites, though not even there was the fortune of war constant.

The military problem was affected by the political organization of the Samnites. In Campania the Sabellians had become city dwellers; in Samnium itself they lived mainly in villages with scattered strong places like Aufidena, the one Samnite site that has been thoroughly excavated. The evidence of the few inscriptions that survive from Samnium proper suggests that each glen had as ruler a meddix or meddix tuticus (= judex populi). They were so far banded into a league as to seem to the Romans a political unity, and we must assume that at Bovianum Vetus or Aesernia representatives met in council under the presidency of the meddices. Some kind of central organization there must have been. Once the league decided to go to war, the heads of the cantons chose a generalissimo whose powers were absolute until the campaign ended. He might be re-elected or succeeded by another chieftain. The very looseness of this league deferred, though it rendered certain, the Roman subjugation of the country. It deferred it because the Romans had no sufficient objective—no real capital at which they could strike a mortal blow. Nor could they detach glen from glen because of the patriotism with which the Samnites clung to their national cause. For in the mountains of Samnium was a sturdy stock not enervated by luxury or weakened by the recruiting of mercenaries from amongst them, and while men of their race, once out of sight of their mountains, were fickleness itself and changed paymasters without hesitation, in their native glens the Samnites were inspired by a passionate devotion to their country which in moments of peril fused the scattered cantons into a nation of heroes. Not even the large population of Latium could provide settlers to cover the country with a network of colonies, and in the tangle of mountains not even the keen glance of the Romans could discover points of decisive strategic value.

The task of the Romans was first to meet the Samnites in the plains and break their military prestige, next by the planting of fortresses to make good the defence of Latium and Campania, and then either to make peace or, if a lasting peace proved unattainable, to carry fire and sword through the glens of the Apennines until there were too few Samnites left to be a danger. To achieve this they had to isolate Samnium and attach to themselves the neighbouring peoples who would help the Roman armies to break into Samnium from every side. The hope of the Samnites was to win resounding successes which would embolden the jealous and the defeated to rise against Rome, or to entrap the Romans before they had adapted their military technique to this terrain. The course of the war which followed showed how hard a task the Romans had set themselves, and more than once, it seemed as if it was beyond their power. But time is on the side of the big battalions, and in the end Rome was victorious.

VI.

 THE GREAT SAMNITE WAR: THE FIRST PHASE

The first phase of what is traditionally called the Second Samnite War ended in disaster and in a bad peace for Rome. Few details of the first years of war appear to the present writer to deserve belief. In the year in which Neapolis admitted the Romans they completed their operations on the Samnite border by capturing the two towns Rufrium and Allifae which command the middle Volturnus valley. There is no record of victories in the field, and we may conjecture that it was not until the next year that the Samnites were ready for serious warfare. The Romans knew that in Apulia they might find allies, and about this time they allied themselves with some at least of the Apulians. The problem was to gain contact with these allies, and that could only be through the tribes north of Samnium. Continuous communication through Samnium itself would only be possible when victory had already been won, whereas the route farther south through Lucania was long, and an attempt to go that way would convert the Lucanians into active allies of their Samnite kinsmen, and force Oscan Nola out of the neutrality which she seems to have preserved throughout most of the war. It is true that Livy declares that the Romans made an alliance with the Lucanians, but this is apparently only to make possible a fine story, borrowed from Greek literature, of its breaking. Rome accordingly turned her attention to the central Apennines and in 325 the consul D. Junius Brutus won a victory in the country of the Vestini while, presumably, his colleague stood on the defensive in Latium or Campania. The Samnites retorted by an attack which caused the Romans to appoint L. Papirius Cursor dictator with Q. Fabius Rullianus master of the horse, and the dictator won a victory and earned a triumph. The other details in Livy are plainly modelled on the events of the Second Punic War. If we content ourselves with this victory, we must put it at an unknown place, Imbrivium, and suppose that that detail came from some elogium of Papirius or of Fabius.

The remaining achievements with which the Romans are credited in the three years that follow are more than suspect, and even aroused doubts in the mind of that honest man of letters Livy. The Fasti triumphales, it is true, credit Q. Fabius with a victory over the Samnites and Apulians in 322 which may mark an extension by arms of Roman influence in Apulia, and Appian records an abortive Samnite attack on Fregellae which may have been rendered possible by this dispersion of Roman forces. It is, however, more than possible that these victories found their way into the tradition as a foil to the disaster of 321. All else recorded for these years deserves little belief—least of all the alleged revolt of Tusculum—, and the variants given by Livy show how much this phase of the war was the sport of rival traditions.

In 321 the consuls were T.Veturius and Sp. Postumius, and they concentrated both consular armies in Campania at Calatia. The reason for this is not at first sight clear. It may be that they anticipated a renewal of the Samnite attack on Fregellae and proposed to counter it by a march through the south of Samnium. This, apart from the devastation of the country, would by its success strengthen the Roman influence in Apulia; Fregellae might be trusted to hold out, and the Latin fortresses would protect Rome and Latium. But the Samnites had this year chosen a general, Gavius Pontius, whose subtlety was greater still. He saw to it that the Roman consuls received news that the Samnite main force was in Apulia. The news, if true, meant that a forced march by the most direct route might enable the Romans to bring the enemy to battle in the plains of Apulia with the Romans between them and their mountains. One great victory might end the war.

But the news was false. The Samnite army had concentrated in Western Samnium, and when the consuls pushed on their way with sanguine improvidence they were entrapped in the narrow valley which led from Saticula to Caudium. The army was doubtless marching light and intending to live upon the country, and, after failing to break out of the trap, it was starved into surrender. The Samnite commander dictated a peace which seemed sufficiently to secure to his nation all that they were fighting for, and took 600 Roman knights as hostages for the acceptance and maintenance of the treaty by the Roman Senate. The defeated army was disarmed and forced to admit its discomfiture by passing beneath a ritual ‘yoke’ of spears. This blow to the military prestige of Rome was doubtless dictated by policy more than by insolent triumph. The terms of the peace were that the Romans should withdraw their garrisons from places which the Samnites claimed as their own, and pledge themselves not to re-open the war.

The Senate, even if it was possible to re-arm their troops at once, had no sufficient motive to refuse the peace, the more as that would have meant the death of the hostages drawn from the noblest families of Rome. Doubtless the shrewd elders who guided Roman policy did not despair of their statecraft, and believed that revenge would be sweeter for a slow ripening. Those who discern in the Samnites the last champions of Italian freedom have denounced their failure to complete their victory. But the Samnites, unconscious of their historic mission, had no reason to believe that Rome was the destined mistress of all Italy or that, if need be, their mountains would not again bring to 'defeat the slow-moving Roman legions. Beyond that, their ideas of policy did not extend. We may suspect that the desultory fighting of the last generation both in central and southern Italy had kept their population stationary or reduced it until the control of the upper valleys of the Liris and the Volturnus met their needs. The peace was made and kept. The house of. one of the consuls, Veturius, relapsed into obscurity for the century, the other, that of Postumius, survived this defeat as it survived others which it brought upon the Roman arms. Publilius Philo, the Fabii, and Papirius Cursor patiently prepared to fight another day.

VII.

 THE GREAT SAMNITE WAR: THE SECOND PHASE

The Caudine peace lasted for five oi six years. It is true that as early as the next century Roman pride disguised the fact by making the Senate denounce the peace at once and inflict on the Samnites defeat after defeat. This fiction was then elaborated by details taken from the Roman behaviour in 136 BC, after C. Hostilius Mancinus had been entrapped in Spain. But when we have relegated to their proper years the Roman victories assigned to 321, 320 and 3191 and to their proper century the elaborate shams and morals which adorn the alleged evasion of the capitulation, we are left with Rome not wholly inactive. While the Samnites occupied Fregellae, and presumably the upper valley of the Volturnus, the Romans strengthened themselves in Apulia and made sure of their connection with it. This activity did not contravene the Caudine peace, and the Romans did nothing which infringed upon the immediate interests of Samnium. In 318, Teanum in Apulia and Canusium gave hostages to Rome, and in 317 the consul C. Junius Bubulcus took Forentum. The Romans were also able to continue the organization of their extending civic boundaries. In 318 the settlers to whom lands had been assigned north of Campania and in the land taken from Privernum were made into two new tribes, Falerna and Oufentina. During the previous twenty-five years the area occupied by Roman citizens with full or partial rights had trebled, and the military resources of Rome were increased until we may suppose that in place of the two legions which, with allied contingents, had been the regular field army of Rome, each of the consuls might command two legions besides the Campanian troops. If we are right in supposing the pilum to have been originally a Samnite weapon, we may assign to this period its introduction into the Roman army and a tactical reform which provided a more flexible manipular formation suitable to the mountain warfare in which the Romans had hitherto proved unsuccessful. For it was the Roman practice to learn from their enemies and to better the instruction.

By the year 316 the Romans felt themselves strong enough to renew the war, and the Samnites must have become aware of the net which their enemies were drawing round them. It is not impossible that they had tampered with the loyalty of the Campanians. The Roman disaster at Caudium must have made a profound impression on the people of Capua who saw the return of the defeated army, and Roman consciousness of this may be reflected in the dispatch of praefecti to Capua and Cumae in 318. For it is probable that the legal duties of these officers were a later growth, and that their first duty was to watch the interests of Rome. In 316, when the storm of war was about to break, the league of Nuceria south of Capua abandoned the friendly neutrality which it had shown to Rome and declared itself the ally of the Samnites.

The Romans, meanwhile, were planning to send a colony to Luceria to form a nucleus for their power in Apulia. They elected as consuls their two most trusted leaders, L. Papirius Cursor, whose task it was to cover the founding of the new colony, and Q. Publilius Philo, who by arms and policy was to hold the Roman Campania which may have been his own creation. This wide dispersal of the Roman forces gave an opening to the unknown strategist who now directed the Samnite forces. While Papirius was marching towards Apulia and Publilius was besieging Saticula so as to block one gateway into the Campanian plain, the main enemy force broke through by Sora into the valley of the Liris. The Romans hastily raised an army of reserves and put at the head of it a dictator, Q. Fabius Rullianus, who had made his name as a general seven years before. He marched south and met the Samnites at Lautulae where his army was defeated and Q. Aulius, his master of the horse, was killed. It was an inauspicious moment in the career of the greatest soldier of the Fabian house, and the historical activities of his family have done their best for him. by giving him a new master of the horse in C. Fabius (who, having served his turn, disappears from history) and by attributing to him an immediate victory.

The fact is plain: one Roman army was in Apulia, another under Publilius Philo was hard beset in Campania, a third had been defeated in a battle which seemed to confirm the verdict of Caudium. There was a movement of secession from Rome northwards as far as Satricum, southwards into Campania. But the Latins held by Rome, and L. Papirius, who had forced the surrender of Luceria which the Samnites had garrisoned, probably hurried back to cover Rome itself1.

When the campaigning season of 314 opened, the initiative lay with the Samnites, and they apparently intended to operate in Campania where Capua itself was on the verge of secession. The moment was critical, and Rome had recourse to a veteran soldier, C. Sulpicius Longus, who won a great victory at Tarracina2 in which the Samnites lost rather more than 10,000 men, if we may accept the not impossible figure given by Diodorus. In Capua the anti-Roman party won the upper hand just too late, and the presence of a victorious Roman army brought the city to repentance. The leaders were executed and Capua remained faithful to Rome for the next hundred years. The story in Livy that the Romans showed their alarm by impeaching Publilius Philo among others is perhaps a fiction, for the procedure suggests the late Republic, but it is true that the end of his long career was clouded by partial failure.

During the next two years the Romans were busy strengthening their shaken power in the south. The Aurunci, whose loyalty was suspect and whose land was needed, were visited with massacres until their name vanished from the earth. A Latin colony was planted at Suessa. Satricum, which had rebelled, was reduced and the ringleaders of the revolt were put to death. This probably happened in 313 when L. Papirius was consul; though the event and the triumph for it have been promoted to his earlier consulship, 319, to make one of the victories of the fictitious war of revenge. In the same year (313) Fregellae was recaptured, and in the next the town of Sora on the Samnite border. It is true that the capture of this town is assigned also to 314, but it is improbable that the Romans could or would have attacked it until after they were re-established at Fregellae. The eastern entrance of the middle Liris valley was guarded by a strong colony at Interamna (312). Farther south, Calatia and Nola1 were captured and made allies and the defence of the Campanian border was strengthened by a colony at Saticula. The coast road to Campania was protected by a colony on the island of Pontia, and the Romans made a beginning with the Via Appia, which was destined, as it progressed, to mark the several stages in the conquest of southern Italy.

Rome was now stronger than when she began the war in 326. In 311 we read of the election of 16 military tribunes by the people, which implies a normal annual levy of four legions, presumably over and above the Campanian formations. In the same year were first appointed duoviri navales to be responsible for the tiny fleet which met Rome’s immediate needs. It is possible that the establishment of this small fleet had been the occasion of the sending of a colony to Ostia, of which the fortifications belong to the second half of the fourth century. The first recorded action of this squadron was inauspicious, an abortive landing at Pompeii to harry the territory of Nuceria (310 BC).

VIII.

THE ROMAN ADVANCE IN CENTRAL ITALY

The expansion of Roman power southwards and the maintenance of it in the face of the Samnites had been made at least easier by the fact that for a generation Rome had not to meet enemies on her northern and north-eastern borders. But now the position became menacing though at the same time full of promise, and Roman policy took a wider range. The strategy of attacking Samnium on the west from southern Latium and Campania and on the east from Apulia had compelled Rome to divide her forces and expose herself to dangerous attacks. Now that Campania was secure from anything more serious than raids, the Romans sought to gain a firmer hold on central Italy so as to be able to operate against Samnium from the north and east while keeping her armies within reach of each other. This new offensive strategy had its defensive side, for by it the Romans might prevent their actual enemies in the south and their potential enemies in the north from joining hands.

To the north of Rome lay the Etruscans, beyond the Apennines the Gauls, to the north-east of Rome the Umbrians, the Sabines and the remnant of the Aequi, beyond them the Praetuttii and Picenum; then came the group of central Italian peoples, Marsi, Vestini, Marrucini, Paeligni and Frentani, with whom 'Rome had made alliances or conventions which allowed her armies to march round to Apulia. But these tribes were kinsmen of the Samnites and also within reach of pressure from them which became more severe as the Samnites sought less and less to advance south-westwards. Thus the Roman hold upon them was precarious until it was confirmed by the establishment of strong centres of Roman influence and by victories in the north of Samnium.

The next decade was to witness a Roman defensive towards Etruria concurrent with a steady advance in the Apennines of central Italy.

After the taking of Rome by the Gauls the southern Etruscans had sought to undo what Rome had done in establishing a defensive frontier north of the Tiber (pp. 574 sqq\ But their efforts had been in vain. Sutrium and Nepete had weathered the storms that beat against their walls, and the old Roman alliance with Caere and new alliances with Tarquinii and Falerii covered whatever of the frontier was not protected by the Monte Cimini, which seemed an impassable barrier to troops. With characteristic prudence Rome did not annex either Tarquinii or Falerii but kept them as buffer-states and as hostages for their kinsmen’s good behaviour. So long as Rome was not too deeply pre-occupied elsewhere, the Roman legions could be in southern Etruria long before the Etruscan cities could join forces against her. A few Roman agents, the friendships of Roman aristocrats for Etruscan lucumos1, would give early information. Beyond that, Rome cared little about Etruria, and the Etruscans, who had reached an unworthy and pessimistic decadence, reflected in the decline of their art which becomes gloomy instead of jovial, had enough to do with the Gauls, who must have seemed a far more dangerous enemy than Rome. But the Gauls gradually ceased from troubling, and as the treaties of Rome with the southern Etruscan cities came near to running out, these cities preferred to look to their kinsmen for help rather than to trust Rome, which was daily becoming more powerful and more dangerous to her neighbours.

We are told that as early as 312 rumours reached Rome of danger from Etruria which led to the appointment of a dictator and that in 311 all the Etruscans except the people of Arretium appeared before Sutrium. One of the consuls, Aemilius Barbula, was sent to relieve the town; according to one tradition he could do no more than fight a drawn battle, according to another, he enjoyed a triumph over the Etruscans. It is probable that the whole story is a fiction and that Aemilius’ triumph was invented to gratify his family and his drawn battle to explain why it was that next year the Etruscans appeared before Sutrium in full force. The first real conflict between Rome and the Etruscans probably belongs to the year 310. The movement was a complete fiasco. While the Etruscans lay outside Sutrium one of the consuls, Q. Fabius, marched boldly through the Monte Cimini and won a victory which apparently brought to the head of affairs the proRoman party in the several Etruscan cities. Treaties were made with Cortona, Perusia and Arretium; in the next year (308) the alliance with Tarquinii was duly renewed and a Roman army brought Volsinii to terms.

Unsuccessful as had been this Etruscan movement, it had not unimportant results. It revealed in Q. Fabius Rullianus a bold strategist and it brought Rome into touch with the Umbrians, whose country lay along the flank of Etruria. We need not believe the story of the wide detour made by Fabius far into the Apennines—which, after all, are not the Ciminian hills—, but there is no reason to doubt that about this time Rome found useful allies in Camerinum in the north-east, and Ocriculum in the south-west, of Umbria. On the other hand, the distraction of Roman attention and the need for keeping considerable forces to counter a danger so near at hand delayed the progress of Roman arms in the other theatres of war. During 312 and 311 the Romans had been active in the country of the Marrucini, where they captured Peltuinum2, and in northern Apulia, though in the latter year the consul C. Junius Bubulcus got himself entangled in the mountains of northern Samnium. He extricated himself and later dedicated a temple to the goddess of Safety for what may have been an escape rather than a victory. In 310 the Romans were apparently on the defensive, and the consul C. Marcius, though credited with the capture of Allifae, barely held his own on the western borders of Samnium. Failure in the field brought out the mythopoeic faculty of the Roman annalists. L. Papirius Cursor is made dictator in order to win a victory at Longula which seems to be no more than an anticipation of his son’s triumph at Aquilonia in 293. Nor need we scruple to deprive that excellent soldier of a victory in Etruria at that historical battlefield Lake Vadimo, a victory which was apparently invented too late to be added in the Fasti triumphales to his alleged success over the Samnites.

It is possible that the settlement with the Etruscans was hastened by the need of maintaining Roman influence among the tribes to the north of Samnium. For in 308 a Samnite army appeared in the country of the Marsi. Fabius, who had been sent with his army to make good the failure of the infant Roman fleet at Nuceria, was recalled to face this threat and was continued in his command as proconsul for the next year. The consul L. Volumnius operated in northern Apulia while his colleague Appius Claudius chafed inactive at Rome. In 306 the Romans were ready to open a new offensive against Samnium from the north-east, but they were hindered by a war with the Hernici, their ancient allies. A generation before, the Hernici had remained neutral or helped Rome in the war with the Latins, and since that time they had played a useful part as a barrier between the Samnites and Latium. The recent expansion of Rome had brought them no profit, and they could not well hope to remain independent when Rome triumphed. Part at least of their communities, with open help from the Samnites and secret encouragement from their neighbours, the Aequi, rose in arms. Sora and Atina, the towns which lay between them and Samnium, were taken. But Aletrium, Ferentinum, and Verulae stood aloof, and C. Marcius, hastily recalled from Apulia, marched into their country. Anagnia, the chief city, was taken, receiving the Roman civitas sine suffragio, and the towns which did not join the movement were made allies of Rome. The stronghold of Frusino which looks down on the Latin Way was forced to surrender and mulcted of part of its territory. We may assume that the Samnites were active in supporting the Hernici, and Marcius’ colleague was left to win easy victories in Apulia and to ravage the east of Samnium.

The power of Rome in central Italy was shaken, and in the next year the Samnites had as allies those of the Hernici who were still in arms and their neighbours, the Aequi and the Paeligni. Apart from an abortive raid in Campania, this region was the main theatre of war. There was hard fighting and one of the consuls fell in battle, but M. Fulvius Curvus, who took his place, won a victory over a Samnite army which tried to relieve the town of Bola in the country of the Aequi. The submission of the Hernici was made complete by the fall of Arpinum; Sora was recaptured, and the taking of Cerfennia1 marked the collapse of the resistance of the Paeligni. In 304 the Romans crushed the Aequi and negotiated with the Samnites, sword in hand. The Samnites, disheartened by their failures, too pessimistic about the present, too optimistic about the future, made a peace which left them with their ancient frontiers almost intact but freed the hands of Rome to complete the fortification of her power in central Italy. The war had given to her Sora and Atina to bar the Samnites from the upper Liris, Allifae and Saticula to cover the Volturnus from north and east. The Roman consul, P. Sulpicius, was granted a triumph to mark the Roman victory. The Samnites had not made submission—they had made a miscalculation. After six years of peace Rome so far completed her mastery of the country that lay between Samnium and Rome’s northern enemies that only for one moment, at Sentinum, could the Samnites raise a coalition to challenge her progress towards the domination of Italy.

One possibility remained, that the Greeks of southern Italy would realize that Rome was a greater menace to their political power than their old Oscan enemies and make common cause with them. But the Greeks were not even united among themselves and were concerned with nearer dangers and ambitions, with the plans of Tarentum and Cleonymus and Agathocles. Unaided, their material forces were no longer a match for Rome and if they were to find a master, it was better to fall into the hands of Rome than be a prey to Samnites and Lucanians. Neither Cleonymus nor Agathocles, a Syracusan tyrant hampered by the hostility of Carthage, was the man to raise Magna Graecia to a last effort to dominate Italy, and the day of Pyrrhus was not yet. If need be, Rome could get help from Carthage which had seen Etruscan ships of war assisting her enemy Agathocles and believed that her interests were best served by sowing disunion among the Greeks of the West. In 306 her treaty with Rome was renewed and it is possible that she gave to the Republic, as to Metapontum, her friend in southern Italy, financial assistance.

It is commonly asserted that Roman coinage began in the second half of the fourth century BC. This is probably true of the aes grave, the bronze moulded pieces of one pound weight which, as true coins, took the place of the bronze for barter, the aes rude. The aes grave bore the stamp of a ship’s prow, and this has been connected with the setting up on the Roman Comitium of the prows of the Antiate galleys taken in 338. But this connection, in itself hazardous, appears to give too early a date in relation to other issues of the kind in central Italy, and it seems more probable that this step was not taken until about the closing decade of the century. Not earlier and possibly a generation later is the inception of the so-called Romano-Campanian silver coinage which bears the legend romano or roma. On one side of some of the earliest of these silver coins appears the horse’s head which was a badge of Carthage, and the deduction has been drawn that we have here silver struck with Carthaginian help at a time when it was in the interest of Carthage to strengthen Rome’s finances. The most notable occasion is the treaty between Rome and Carthage at the time of the Pyrrhic war but the shadowy treaty of the two states about 306 must not be forgotten. Somewhat in favour of the later date is the marked resemblance between the head of Apollo on a bronze coin of Beneventum (after 268)and that on some of the earliest of the ‘Romano-Campanian’ didrachms, a resemblance which suggests that the two series were struck in the lifetime of the same artist. But the numismatic history of Italy and of the Greek mints of Magna Graecia has not yet reached sufficiently certain results to enable the historian to say with confidence how long before, or how soon after, the year 300 Rome first had the use of silver currency for trade both with her Italian and Greek neighbours. The important date is later, the year, 268, when Rome first struck the silver denarius which soon became the symbol and instrument of Rome’s hegemony in Italy.

IX.

THE LAST CRISIS

The Romans now turned to the consolidation of their position. A strong colony was sent to Sora, and the civitas sine suffragio was conferred on Arpinum and Trebula, apparently Trebula Suffenas in the country of the Aequi. The war with the Aequi was convenient, for it justified the annexation of territory on which in 304 were planted the colony of Alba Fucens and in 302 the colony of Carsioli. Six thousand colonists were sent to the first, four thousand to the second, a sufficient proof of their strategic importance. It is possible that the founding of Carsioli did not pass off peaceably and that C. Junius Bubulcus, a good soldier, was made dictator to crush local resistance. Binding alliances were made with the Vestini, the Marsi, the Paeligni, the Marrucini and the Frentani. In Etruria the Cilnii, who ruled in Arretium and had been driven out by a revolution, were restored by Roman intervention. In the north of Apulia a Roman force was given the credit for the ejection of the Spartan Cleonymus from that coast. Thus far the Romans had achieved security near home, but there was a danger in the north. As we have seen, the raids of the Gauls had ceased and, a generation before this time, a treaty with the Senones gave Rome security. But new bands of Celts had crossed the Alps and roused their kinsmen from the agricultural life into which they were settling. For the moment these were at war with the Veneti, but Rome hastened to make an alliance with the Picentes in order to block a southern advance of the Gauls along that line (299). They might hope that the Etruscans, for their own sake, would help to keep the Gauls north of the Apennines.

Between Etruria and Picenum lay the country of the Umbrians and the Sabines. The Umbrians had suffered from the Gauls, who had taken the strip of Umbrian coast on the Adriatic; at the crisis of 225 they counted no more than 20,000 men. Their geographical position made the country useful to Rome as a barrier between her northern and southern enemies, and at the same time ensured the destiny of its unorganized population as subject either to the Gauls or to Rome. In the south of Umbria Rome was already allied with Ocriculum, in the north with Camerinum. A clear policy was marked out for Rome, to extend her influence until there was no danger of a Gallic advance through Umbria or of Umbrian defection to her enemies. It was a race which Rome almost lost, but the first stage in her progress is marked by the taking of Nequinum and its transformation into the Roman colony of Narnia. The strategic importance of Narnia is that it guards the point where the ancient road which was to be the Via Flaminia crosses the river Nar. It is conceivable that the statement in Livy that in 298 the Romans sent a colony to Carsioli, if it is not a mere duplication of the foundation of 302, conceals an advance yet farther north to Carsulae. The advance does not necessarily imply Roman control of the southern part of the Sabine country, as the military route would go by way of Falerii, which seems to have been used at this time as a Roman place d'armes. At the same time we can well believe that some of the Sabine communities feared for their independence, and, as they found themselves becoming a mere enclave among Roman allies and subjects, looked for an opportunity of striking a blow before it was too late.

In the meantime Rome was busy consolidating her gains of territory elsewhere by the formation of two new tribes, the Aniensis carved out of the territory of the Aequi, the Teretina in the valley of the Trerus composed largely of the land taken from Frusino. These tribes were made in 299, but in that year the Romans found themselves distracted by the northern danger. The Gauls had swept down into Etruria, to be met not by a sturdy resistance but by the suggestion that farther south they would find Roman territory to ravage. Several of the Etruscan cities joined with them and their forces crossed the Roman frontier and then quickly retired again to quarrel among themselves about the booty they had made. We may suspect that Etruria suffered more from the passage of the Gauls than Rome from their hasty plundering, but the mere news that the Gauls were on the warpath meant anxiety in Rome and aroused new hopes wherever Rome was feared. If the day of the Allia came again Rome’s neighbours would know better how to profit by her misfortunes.

Meanwhile the Samnites, perhaps in the belief that Rome would concentrate all her strength on her northern borders, saw an opportunity of gaining control of Lucania, which had taken the side of Rome, so far as it had taken any side at all, in the struggle that had just ended. Agathocles of Syracuse was on the point of landing in Italy, and it may have seemed an opportunity to anticipate his possible enterprise. But Rome accepted the challenge with alacrity. War was declared, and L. Cornelius Scipio Barbatus, one of the consuls of 298, marched through the south-western corner of Samnium, taking Taurasia and Cisauna, and forced the pro-Samnite Lucanians to give hostages for their fidelity to Rome. This achievement, which his epitaph enlarged to a claim to have subdued all Lucania, was doubtless made possible by a vigorous attack launched against the north of Samnium by his colleague Cn. Fulvius. He struck at Bovianum Vetus, the old centre of the Samnite league, defeated an army that came against him, and took the town and its northern neighbour Aufidena. The strategic value of Roman control of the northern tribes was demonstrated, and Fulvius returned to enjoy a well-earned triumph. Livy, it is true, attributes to Scipio operations in Etruria, but as these do not appear in his epitaph they were, if historical, unimportant or inglorious. The Etruscans are added to the Samnites by the Fasti triumphales in the entry of Fulvius’ triumph, but this may be no more than an anticipation of his operations in that region three years later. It is clear that any hopes of an immediate Gallic attack on Rome had come to nothing, and the Samnites were exposed to the full pressure of the Roman armies.

This time Rome was determined to make an end. Her two ablest generals, Q. Fabius Rullianus and P. Decius Mus, were elected consuls for 297 and during this year and the next they led their legions to destroy village after village in the Samnite glens. They even wintered in Samnium, thus preventing the herds and flocks from coming down to the lower pasturage. We may suspect that the Samnites had suffered severely in their defeat before Bovianum and were not able to face the Romans in a great pitched battle. But as Decius and Fabius, now proconsuls, were occupied in the east and south of Samnium, where they took Murgantia, an unknown Ferentinum, and Romulea, the Samnites saw a possibility of joining hands with the northern enemies of Rome. Before the year 296 was out the danger was realized. The consul Volumnius was recalled from Campania, where he had repelled one of the occasional raids on which the Samnites ventured, to reinforce his colleague App. Claudius in the south of Etruria, who, if we may believe his family’s record of his achievement, had been engaged with Etruscans and Sabines. It was the fate of the Claudii to be often overblamed, and rarely overpraised, and it may be that there is some truth in the record and that Sabines on the Etruscan border had taken the field on what they may have believed to be the winning side.

The Romans faced their dangers undaunted. Q. Fabius and P. Decius the consuls, on whose well-tried skill rested the hopes of Rome, knew or divined that the Samnites had planned to break through to the north and join hands with the Gauls beyond the Apennines. Thence they might advance into Etruria, gathering allies as they went, or they might strike direct at Rome itself. The problem of this alternative approach on Rome was to be recurrent in the history of the Republic. It was solved by leaving reserve forces to cover Rome and to be ready at the right moment to advance into Etruria, while the two consuls with the main field-army were to prevent the junction of the Gauls and Samnites or, failing that, to fight a battle at once. Near the natural point of junction lay the allied city of Camerinum, a rallying point for Roman friends and a base for Rome’s armies in northern Umbria. The Romans arrived almost too late. The Samnites had joined hands with the Gauls and defeated the Roman advance guard near Camerinum. But Fabius and Decius were close at hand and a few days later near Sentinum on the north-eastern slopes of the Apennines was fought a great battle which decided the destiny of central Italy.

It was the supreme test of the reformed Roman army which met the furious onslaught of the Gauls and the stubborn valour of the Samnites. One consul, P. Decius, gave his life to steady his troops and the legions stood firm; at last the tide of battle turned against the confederates. The great coalition collapsed, the Gauls retired, and the remnant of the Samnites broke away south and, after losing part of their troops in the country of the Paeligni, regained their mountains. Q. Fabius made a military promenade through Etruria, where L. Postumius and Cn. Fulvius had performed their task of making good the Roman border, and returned to Rome to celebrate a triumph over Samnites, Gauls and Etruscans. The triumph was well deserved. Decius, who fell, has remained the hero of Sentinum, but we may fairly suppose that the true architect of victory was Fabius. His march through the Ciminian forest fifteen years before had revealed in him something more than a conventional strategist, and we may credit him with the bold decision to defend Rome and dispute the possession of Etruria on the farther side of the Apennines.

There is no need to abandon Polybius and to believe with Livy that the Romans were faced by any considerable force of Etruscans or Umbrians as well as Gauls and Samnites. A few Umbrians may have joined the Samnites after their success near Camerinum but doubtless most of them welcomed the passage of a Roman army marching to fight the Gauls. Nor need we suppose that the Etruscans marched to Sentinum and then returned to Etruria because the Roman reserve armies invaded their country, still less that the consuls at Sentinum were in close touch with their lieutenants near Rome and ordered their advance while they themselves delayed a battle until the Etruscans had retired. To fight and win a battle when that battle was fought against such enemies was achievement enough for any general and any army. But among those that fell was a strategist who can rival Fabius, the Samnite Gellius Egnatius, who had conceived and brought so near to triumph the grandiose scheme of saving his country’s cause by this great coalition. Two hundred years later the last throw of the Samnites for freedom was to be lost when a Sabellian army was crushed not far from that very spot as it sought to force its way into Etruria.

Many historians have lamented the issue of Sentinum and seen in the Samnites the martyrs of Italian freedom. But if the legions had been broken, what future was there for Italy but centuries of disunion, or precarious domination by a mountain people devoid of political instincts, whose virtues ended where their neighbours’ lands began?

X.

 THE FINAL VICTORY

Fate had declared for Rome; it remained to break down the last resistance of the Samnites and to complete the Roman command of central Italy. The Gauls and northern Etruria might wait, and a peace for forty years was granted to Volsinii, Perusia, and Arretium. The Samnite raids into the Falernian plain were checked by the planting of colonies at Minturnae and Sinuessa on the Appian Way. One of the consuls of 294, L. Postumius, was sent to prepare an advance into Samnium from Apulia, but suffered a reverse; his colleague M. Atilius was employed in Etruria, where doubtless his army strengthened Roman diplomacy. One reason for the comparative inactivity of Rome may be found in the record of a plague which visited the city, but we can well believe that the strain of the year of Sentinum had for the moment sapped even the energy of Rome.

In 293 the Romans put out a great effort against the Samnites. Q. Fabius had fought his last battle, and the consuls for the next year were L. Papirius, the son of Fabius’ old colleague and rival, and Sp. Carvilius, whose career was destined to be linked with that of Papirius. The details of the campaign which followed are difficult to elucidate. Livy’s account is as follows.

A Roman army had been left at Interamna on the river Liris at the close of the preceding year. Carvilius took over this force and marched against Samnium, taking Amiternum from the Samnites. After laying waste Samnite territory, he next appears before Cominium. His colleague Papirius raised an army at Rome and, after taking Duronia, had reached Aquilonia, and the two consuls are described as being within reach of each other. One or both of them had ravaged the territory of Atina. The main body of the Samnites faced Papirius at Aquilonia, which is described as if it was not far from Bovianum, presumably Bovianum Vetus. These names present a series of geographical problems. It is improbable that there was any other Amiternum than the Sabine town on the river Aternus, a river which does not find a namesake in Samnium. If the text of Livy is sound, we must either suppose that Carvilius, having an army ready for action, marched north through a corner of Samnium to wrest Amiternum from the Samnites before he turned south again towards his main objective, or fall back on the hypothesis rendered improbable by the explicitness of Livy, that his army had wintered not at Interamna on the Liris but at Inte-ramna Nahars in the Sabine country. Further, we have to choose between the known Aquilonia (Lacedogna) and Cominium Ocritum, both in the far south of Samnium, and a Cominium east of Sora, attested by the survival of the name in medieval times, together with an Aquilonia assigned without any direct evidence to a site near Aufidena in the Sagrus valley. In favour of these shadowy places is the alleged nearness to Bovianum, the possible nearness to Atina and the statement that after Aquilonia Papirius next attacked Saepinum. The mention of Duronia does not help us, for although the name has been conferred on the village of Civita Vecchia near Boiano (Bovianum Undecimanorum), the identification is far from certain.

Of one thing, however, we may be sure. Papirius defeated the Samnites in a great battle which completed the work of Sentinum. This exploit inspires Livy to one of the most brilliant narrations in Latin literature. Bands of Samnites had sworn an oath to die rather than give ground but at last they broke before the steady valour of the Romans led by the young Papirius who in the heat of the battle vowed to Jupiter, not a temple as other generals, but the first draught of wine when the day was won.

Papirius marched to Saepinum and thence to Rome, while his army was quartered on the lower Liris. Carvilius is then described as besieging Velia, Palumbinum, the site of which is unknown, and Herculaneum, but these operations should more probably be assigned to his second consulship in 272, when the Romans were active in that region. He is also credited with exploits in the south of Etruria, where he attacked an unknown place Troilum and made a truce with the Falisci, who were said to be in arms, but these exploits may be no more than an anticipation of his operations in the next year as lieutenant of D. Junius Brutus. The main effort of Rome was against Samnium and the consuls earned the triumphs ‘ de Samnitibus ’ which they received.

If we assign to 292 the Roman settlement with Falerii, we may be content to see in the story of the defeat of the consul Q. Fabius Gurges, and his subsequent victory with his father’s help, a pious fiction, helped out by details from the Second Punic War1, which anticipated with advantages his victory over the Samnites, Lucanians and Bruttians in 276. The comparative inaction of Rome may be explained by the continued presence of the plague. It is precisely at this point that the mytho-poeic tradition of the Fabian house does most to obscure the course of events, and the final defeat of the Samnites seems to be due to L. Postumius Megellus, consul in 291 b.c., whom the Senate succeeded in depriving of a triumph, and to a greater man, M. Curius Dentatus, consul in 290. With this last victory, which earned for Curius a triumph, the Samnites at last were brought to acknowledge defeat, and the full power of Rome was set free to act against her neighbours, the Sabines.

Some modern scholars have advanced the hypothesis that the Roman annalists or their sources had freely confused Sabines and Samnites, sometimes using ‘Samnites’ for Sabines. It is true that the word ‘Sabine’ might, to an etymologist, include ‘Samnites,’ and it is also true that Greek annalists may have used the name of the Samnites they knew to describe any of the Apennine peoples; and in this Roman annalists may here and there have followed them. But there is no decisive evidence of the confusion, and in the only year in which it is certain that important operations were conducted against both Samnites and Sabines the consul of that year is credited with two triumphs, one against each of them. The theory that what is called the Third Samnite War (298-90) was mainly conducted against the Sabines appears to the present writer to be a priori improbable. The Sabine country proper can hardly have been a danger to Rome. Under the early Republic the Roman frontier had been advanced nearly as far as Eretum. The one considerable piece of flat country, the plain north of Reate, was not yet drained, and we may fairly assume that during the fifth century the institution of the ver sacrum and the impulse of adventure had gone far to reduce the population. The sober home-keeping remnant had for a century at least been good neighbours to Rome and there is linguistic evidence to suggest that much of the Sabine country was already in part latinized. T he various Sabine towns with their octoviri as magistrates appear to have had no close union, and had they been formidable, we may take it that Rome would not for so long have brooked a danger near their very gates.

But now that Rome had learnt the value of a strong barrier to keep apart the peoples of the north and the south of Italy, the independence of the Sabines must be ended. It is possible that the Roman advance in Umbria had seemed to some Sabines a menace and that the march of Carvilius to Amiternum was to forestall or to crush a pro-Samnite movement. Now, in 290, Curius led the Roman legions into the Sabine country and the whole people was incorporated into the Roman state as cives sine suffragio. The alleged wholesale expulsion of Sabines followed by confiscation and distribution of lands among Roman citizens is inconsistent with what seems to be the Roman policy, and probably is part of an annalistic fiction which tried to make of Curius a forerunner of the Gracchi1. It is more probable that the Sabines were left in possession of their lands, and that Rome took no more than the plain reclaimed later by the draining of the Campi Roseae. What Rome needed at this moment was trusty soldiers and these they found in the people who in their tradition had played a part in the earliest growth of Rome. The continued presence of the Sabines in their country is attested by the characteristic personal names ending in edius which persisted in this region. Before a generation had passed the Sabines received the full Roman franchise, while they retained in local self-government some traces of their own older institutions.

With this act of statesmanship this chapter in the story of Rome’s advance to the mastery of Italy finds its natural conclusion. The extension of Roman power south and north of this central block of territory and the organization of the great Italic federation of which Rome was now the unchallenged leader will be described later. By arms and diplomacy, by statecraft—sometimes cynical, sometimes generous, always prudent—the new and old nobility of Rome had learnt to repair defeats and to use victories; and during a period of willing and unwilling concessions to the plebeians, the Senate had earned the right to retain the control of high policy and to stand for the very spirit of Rome.

CHAPTER XIX

AGATHOCLES