The Rise of Rome

Another innovative device helped the Romans not only to secure their conquests, but to unify them with their conquerors. This was the foundation of coloniae, “colonies,” by which small groups of Latin, Campanian, and Roman settlers established their own townships on annexed enemy territory; sometimes these were new foundations, but on occasion they were attached to existing settlements. They were useful watch posts that could detect early signs of trouble in the surrounding population; they also alleviated economic pressures at Rome by providing farms and jobs for the landless poor. Coastal coloniae relieved the Republic of the need to build a fleet to defend home waters. Above all, this colonial system, as it developed over time, contributed powerfully to the cultural Romanization of Italy.

It took some time for the settlement to bed down. Many Latin communities resented the loss of their age-old freedoms, and Rome took care to leave them free to run their own local affairs. Their city walls were not leveled but left standing—clever and persuasive symbolism.

It has been estimated that the extent of territory now occupied by Roman citizens of every kind, the ager Romanus, was 3,400 square miles, and that of the larger Roman commonwealth as a whole 5,300 square miles. According to a modern calculation, the total population of the ager Romanus was 347,300 free persons and that of the commonwealth 484,000 free persons.

Rome had become a substantial state, by Greco-Roman standards; it was a token of its growing power that a second treaty of friendship with Carthage was negotiated in 348. Its conquests meant, among other things, that the problem of poverty and indebtedness that beset the young Republic was alleviated, although it never vanished. As we have seen, an indigent Roman would be paid a salary if he fought in the army. He might be allocated a smallholding in freshly conquered territory and, if he was willing to leave the city, he could join a colonia and make a new life for himself.

IF EVER A landscape made its people, it was Samnium.

This is a mountainous, landlocked plateau in central Italy. Here the Apennines are not so much mountains as a tangled maze of massifs, spurs, and reentrants. The region is roughly rectangular and is cut through by steep valleys often ending in culs-de-sac, down which rivers or seasonal torrents cascade. Here and there gray limestone mountains push up toward the sky, and are covered in snow for most of the year. Much of the usable land is suitable only for grazing, but there are many fertile pockets where earth can be tilled and crops grown. Rich, narrow fields lie alongside streams. Winters were wild and austere, summers arid and baking hot. Earthquakes racked and eroded the hills.

As we have seen, the Samnites were among the infiltration southward, propelled by Sacred Springs, of Oscan speakers in previous centuries. By 500, if not earlier, they had settled in their new rugged homeland. They coveted the flat, fertile earth of Campania and its cultured cities. Some of them descended from their aeries, conquered the inhabitants, and took over the territory. They soon learned to enjoy an easier way of life and forgot their highland ancestry.

The Samnites were fierce and hardy mountaineers. Excavated skeletons show that they were ethnically homogeneous and dolichocephalic (that is, their heads were unusually long from front to back), from which we can infer that, isolated among their peaks, they did not intermarry with their Latin neighbors. Pre-urban, they lived in scattered villages and built many small stone forts on remote hilltops (about ninety of which have been located by archaeologists); most were not for living in but were a temporary refuge in times of trouble.

There were four Samnite tribal groups, each forming a community called a touto. The Hirpini lived in the south, the Caudini in the west, the Carracini in the northeast, and the largest, the Pentri, occupied the center and east of Samnium. The total number of inhabitants was surprisingly high for a remote rural area and is estimated at about 450,000 persons.

In general, the Samnites were poor and relatively unsophisticated, with no coinage and little trade. There seems to have been an aristocracy with large landholdings, but their politics were democratic and simply organized. One or more villages made up a pagus, an economically self-sufficient and independent- minded canton. It elected a governing official called a meddis. A group of pagi made up the tribal touto, whose annually elected chief magistrate was a meddis tovtiks. There appears to have been a council that magistrates were obliged to consult. Despite their decentralized political system, Samnites possessed a powerful sense of cultural identity.

The economy—landlocked as it was, and lacking in raw materials for industries—was centered on animal husbandry and peasant farming. The Samnites raised horses, poultry, pigs, and goats. Above all, they were sheep breeders. In the summer, their animals grazed on high ground; for the winter months, they were taken down to the plains along wide drovers’ trails, which doubled as the main means of human communication in Samnium. Among the region’s specialties were fine wines and sweet Sabellian cabbages.

Only glimpses of daily life have come down to us. Oscans, such as the Samnites, were known for their barbaric and uncouth ways, although their addiction to obscenity may, as often happens, have been a jokey stereotype attributed to them by their neighbors and based on an ecccentric etymological derivation of obscenus, from O(b)scan. They appear to have had some odd habits. They had their pubic hair shaved off in barbershops, in full view of passersby, for example. According to Strabo the geographer:

The Samnites have a splendid law, well designed to foster excellence. Every year ten virgins and ten young men are chosen as the best of their sex. And the best young woman is given to the best youth, the second to the second and so on. If the youth who wins the prize changes and turns out bad, they dishonor him and take away the woman he has been awarded.

Little is recorded of the place of women in Samnite society, but the first-century poet Horace, who came from the southern Samnite town of Venusia and was in a position to know, implies that they exercised authority in the household; they brought up the children and had a reputation for severity.

In their scant leisure time, Samnites hunted, as much for food as for amusement. They were very fond of the theater, with a pronounced taste for farce, satire, and crude invective. A fresco of dancing girls has survived, and perhaps folk dancing was among their entertainments. It is said that the bloodstained diversions of the arena were invented by Oscans. It cannot be proved that gladiators derive from Samnium itself, but their emergence in Campania coincided suspiciously with the Samnite invasion in the fifth century. It may be no accident that, in later times, the most popular type of gladiator, equipped with a short sword, a rectangular shield, a greave, and a helmet, was called a Samnite.

THESE WERE THE people with whom Rome found itself in a long life-and-death duel in the latter part of the fourth century. To begin with, the two nations were friends, signing a treaty in 354. However, Rome wished to expand, and the Samnites were compelled to do so as well. Their growing population spilled out in all directions of the compass, into adjoining lands. Rome’s new dominance in Campania was a particular affront. A collision was inevitable.

A short first war only temporarily interrupted the alliance. Then, in 328, the Romans planted a colonia, Fregellae, in the western valley of the river Liris, a provocative act because this territory was claimed by the Samnites and led up into their heartland. Then, in the following year, the Samnites could not resist taking advantage of internal dissension at the port of Neapolis, in Campania, and occupying it. The Romans reacted strongly to this challenge to their authority; they drove out the occupiers and thus precipitated the Second Samnite War.

This was a long and bitter struggle that lasted on and off for more than twenty years. Samnium was a vast natural fortress, with few points of access. Any army determined enough to enter it was confronted by a labyrinth of narrow valleys and tight gorges—ideal terrain for the layer of ambushes. Not unnaturally, the Romans fought shy of a direct assault and much of the fighting occurred on or near the Samnite borders. The Caudine catastrophe of 321 was an example of this, taking place as it did on one of the two main routes that led from Samnium and Campania to Latium. Although it was a grave setback, recovery was swift.

Rather than seek to invade Samnium itself, with all the risks that entailed, Rome’s strategy was to surround the Samnites with enemies. Alliances were struck with communities in Apulia, on the eastern seaboard, and