The Rise of Rome

“My first advice,” he said, “which I thought the best, would establish lasting peace with a very powerful people by conferring on them an immense benefit. The second would postpone war for many generations during which the Romans would not easily recover their strength.… There was no third option.”

But what if the Samnites took a middle course, letting the Romans go unhurt but imposing terms on them as defeated men according to the laws of war? Herennius would have none of it. “Your idea will neither win friends nor remove enemies,” he said. “The Roman People does not know how to lie down under defeat.” His advice was rejected for a third and final time, and he went home.

The Romans made a number of unsuccessful attempts to break out. Food stocks began to run very low, and the consuls sent a delegation to Pontius to seek terms. If they failed to win a peace, they would challenge the enemy to fight. “You Romans never admit catastrophe even when conquered and taken captive,” the Samnite leader responded. “So I will send you under the yoke unarmed, with a single item of clothing each.” (By “yoke,” he meant the arch made of three spears beneath which defeated and captured soldiers were obliged to walk in return for their freedom.) He added that the Romans should immediately evacuate Samnite territory and withdraw its two forward colonies at Cales and Fregellae.

It was self-evidently a disgraceful settlement, but, thought the consuls, better than the alternative—the complete destruction of their army. However, Livy assures us, they were only in a position to offer a personal guarantee that Rome accepted the terms (a sponsio). A final treaty (or foedus) would have to await approval by the Assembly at Rome. The trusting Pontius took the point and allowed the legions to depart in return for a sponsio, to which the consuls and senior officers subscribed. However, he demanded six hundred Roman cavalry as hostages. A dramatic scene ensued:

The Consuls, pretty much half-naked, were the first to be sent under the yoke, then their officers were humiliated, each in order of rank; then the legions, one by one in turn. The enemy stood round, taunting and jeering at them; many were threatened with swords, and some were wounded or killed if the expressions on their faces showed too much resentment at their intolerable position.

Once the troops were back in Rome, the public mood darkened. Many people went into mourning, feasts and marriages were canceled, shops closed, and official business in the Forum suspended. New consuls were elected, and the Senate held a debate on whether or not to endorse the sponsio. One of the defeated commanders advised his colleagues, self-sacrificially, to reject it on the bare-faced excuse that he and his fellow consul had not acted of their own free will but from necessity, thanks to the enemy’s treacherous ambush. But as a matter of honor, he went on, he and all the other army officers involved should be handed over to the Samnites.

This was agreed, but, on their arrival at the Samnite camp, Pontius refused to accept their surrender. He argued that if the treaty was refused everything should revert to the status quo ante. In other words, the legions should go back to the Caudine Forks. “You are never without a reason for not keeping your word in defeat?” he asked. “You agreed with us on a peace, so that we should return you the legions we had captured. Now you have nullified that peace. And you always give your fraud some semblance of legality.”

It is hard to disagree with this judgment, which is remarkable in that it is Livy, the most patriotic of authors, who put these words into the mouth of the Samnite commander. The Romans placed a very high value on fair dealing. On this occasion, they claimed to be keeping to the letter of the law, but one has the impression that they sensed, guiltily, that they were not keeping to its spirit. According to one report, the Romans, far from being grateful to the Samnites for letting their soldiers go, “actually behaved as if they had been the victims of some outrage.”

In any event, war resumed and the Romans allegedly won a resounding victory, after which they compelled Pontius and his fellow captives to submit to the yoke themselves, a remarkable example of instant and mirror- imaged retribution that probably never took place.

In fact, we have good grounds for supposing that the official version of the affair does not square with what actually occurred. Some ancient writers asserted that the agreement between the warring parties was in fact a foedus, not a sponsio, and that Roman apologists tried to hide the fact. Cicero, for example, an intelligent and thoughtful voice, twice speaks of a foedus.

What happened to the six hundred hostages? These are the dogs not barking in the night. Were they killed, or released? A suspicious silence hangs over their fate. They are needed to back up a sponsio, but once a foedus was in place they would become superfluous and be handed back. But if the sponsio was rejected, the presumed consequence would be their execution. From the fact that nothing is said about them, we may infer that a treaty was approved by the Roman Assembly. It looks very much as if the aborted sponsio was a later invention designed to excuse Roman bad faith.

A further problem muddies the narrative. The description of the Caudine Forks is only very roughly right. We are not absolutely certain where they are, but the only plausible candidate is a pass in Campania between the two modern Italian towns of Arienzo and Arpaia, which was helpfully known in ancient times as Furculae or Furcae— namely, “forks.” Here there were two entrances leading into an area surrounded by mountains and steep hills, as Livy says. However, while the eastern gorge was narrow enough to be easily blocked, the western defile was two miles wide—far too long for the Samnites to have erected barricades capable of bottling in a Roman army. There must have been a battle of some sort that led to a surrender. Why the inaccuracy? Perhaps because it was less shameful to capitulate to deceit and trickery than to do so after a straightforward defeat in the field.

It is certain that the Romans suffered a devastating military setback at the Caudine Forks. It is now too late to establish the details of what took place beyond doubt, but a plausible scenario might run as follows: The Samnites forced a battle by blocking the eastern defile of the Caudine Forks and then turning up en masse at the western entrance. A battle ensued and the Romans were routed but had nowhere they could escape to, so they surrendered. A sponsio was agreed while Rome was informed and approved a foedus.

It is likely that the terms of the foedus were abrogated and hostilities resumed. This was a dishonorable thing to do (and something, as far as possible, to be hidden from posterity), but there is evidence of continued fighting (in 319, a Roman general is recorded as celebrating a triumph de Samnitibus). Alternatively, it has been contended that Rome in fact abided by the treaty it had accepted and that hostilities ceased for a few years. But if that was the case it is difficult to explain why some ancient authors should concoct a canceled sponsio and others a broken foedus, for both of these acts are more to Rome’s discredit than a perfectly respectable truth.

The debacle of the Caudine Forks and its aftermath is a useful reminder, if that were needed, that, whatever their high principles, the Romans were more than capable of cynical and self-interested behavior. They criticized Pontius for outmaneuvering an army by a trick, but throughout their history many of their own generals acted just as deceitfully. Cassius Dio judged that the Samnites were unfairly treated, and his assessment is not far off the mark: “It is not inevitable that those who are wronged should conquer; instead, war, in its absolute sway, adjusts everything to the advantage of the victor, often causing something that is the reverse of justice to go under that name.”

THE FIFTY-YEAR INTERVAL between Rome’s two massive setbacks illustrates its capacity to regenerate after failure. The Republic, battered but unbowed, pressed ahead with its program of reconciliation at home and expansion abroad.

The Conflict of the Orders had not gone away. Once the dust had settled after the Celtic invasion, domestic hostilities resumed, with a vengeance. Debt remained a crushing burden for the poor, whose landholdings were too small to make even basic subsistence easy, and wealthy plebeians were still finding it hard to gain access to high office. In effect, the patricians maintained their monopoly on power.