exertions made about this very period by the Tarentines to get quit
of their Sabellian neighbours. But the Romans also had good reason
for coming to terms as quickly as possible with the Samnites; for the
impending transition of the region bordering on the south of Latium
into the possession of the Romans converted the ferment that had long
existed among the Latins into open insurrection. All the original
Latin towns, even the Tusculans who had been received into the
burgess-union of Rome, took up arms against Rome, with the single
exception of the Laurentes, whereas of the colonies founded beyond
the bounds of Latium only the old Volscian towns Velitrae, Antium,
and Tarracina adhered to the revolt. We can readily understand how
the Capuans, notwithstanding their very recent and voluntarily offered
submission to the Romans, should readily embrace the first opportunity
of again ridding themselves of the Roman rule and, in spite of the
opposition of the optimate party that adhered to the treaty with Rome,
should make common cause with the Latin confederacy, whereas the still
independent Volscian towns, such as Fundi and Formiae, and the Hernici
abstained like the Campanian aristocracy from taking part in this
revolt. The position of the Romans was critical; the legions which
had crossed the Liris and occupied Campania were cut off by the revolt
of the Latins and Volsci from their home, and a victory alone could
save them. The decisive battle was fought near Trifanum (between
Minturnae, Suessa, and Sinuessa) in 414; the consul Titus Manlius
Imperiosus Torquatus achieved a complete victory over the united
Latins and Campanians. In the two following years the individual
towns, so far as they still offered resistance, were reduced by
capitulation or assault, and the whole country was brought into
subjection. The effect of the victory was the dissolution of the
Latin league. It was transformed from an independent political
federation into a mere association for the purpose of a religious
festival; the ancient stipulated rights of the confederacy as to
a maximum for the levy of troops and a share of the gains of war
perished as such along with it, and assumed, where they were
recognized in future, the character of acts of grace. Instead of
the one treaty between Rome on the one hand and the Latin confederacy
on the other, there came at best perpetual alliances between Rome and
the several confederate towns. To this footing of treaty there were
admitted of the old-Latin places, besides Laurentum, also Tibur and
Praeneste, which however were compelled to cede portions of their
territory to Rome. Like terms were obtained by the communities of
Latin rights founded outside of Latium, so far as they had not taken
part in the war. The principle of isolating the communities from each
other, which had already been established in regard to the places
founded after 370,(21) was thus extended to the whole Latin nation.
In other respects the several places retained their former privileges
and their autonomy. The other old-Latin communities as well as the
colonies that had revolted lost--all of them--independence and
entered in one form or another into the Roman burgess-union. The two
important coast towns Antium (416) and Tarracina (425) were, after
the model of Ostia, occupied with Roman full-burgesses and restricted
to a communal independence confined within narrow limits, while the
previous burgesses were deprived in great part of their landed
property in favour of the Roman colonists and, so far as they retained
it, likewise adopted into the full burgess-union. Lanuvium, Aricia,
Momentum, Pedum became Roman burgess-communities after the model of
Tusculum.(22) The walls of Velitrae were demolished, its senate was
ejected -en masse- and deported to the interior of Roman Etruria,
and the town was probably constituted a dependent community with
Caerite rights.(23) Of the land acquired a portion--the estates,
for instance, of the senators of Velitrae--was distributed to Roman
burgesses: with these special assignations was connected the erection
of two new tribes in 422. The deep sense which prevailed in Rome
of the enormous importance of the result achieved is attested by
the honorary column, which was erected in the Roman Forum to the
victorious dictator of 416, Gaius Maenius, and by the decoration
of the orators' platform in the same place with the beaks taken
from the galleys of Antium that were found unserviceable.
Complete Submission of the Volscian and Campanian Provinces
In like manner the dominion of Rome was established and confirmed in
the south Volscian and Campanian territories. Fundi, Formiae,
Capua, Cumae, and a number of smaller towns became dependent Roman
communities with self-administration. To secure the pre-eminently
important city of Capua, the breach between the nobility and commons
was artfully widened, the communal constitution was revised in the
Roman interest, and the administration of the town was controlled by
Roman officials annually sent to Campania. The same treatment was
measured out some years after to the Volscian Privernum, whose
citizens, supported by Vitruvius Vaccus a bold partisan belonging to
Fundi, had the honour of fighting the last battle for the freedom of
this region; the struggle ended with the storming of the town (425)
and the execution of Vaccus in a Roman prison. In order to rear a
population devoted to Rome in these regions, they distributed, out
of the lands won in war particularly in the Privernate and Falernian
territories, so numerous allotments to Roman burgesses, that a few
years later (436) they were able to institute there also two new
tribes. The establishment of two fortresses as colonies with Latin
rights finally secured the newly won land. These were Cales (420)
in the middle of the Campanian plain, whence the movements of Teanum
and Capua could be observed, and Fregellae (426), which commanded
the passage of the Liris. Both colonies were unusually strong, and
rapidly became flourishing, notwithstanding the obstacles which the
Sidicines interposed to the founding of Cales and the Samnites to that
of Fregellae. A Roman garrison was also despatched to Sora, a step
of which the Samnites, to whom this district had been left by the
treaty, complained with reason, but in vain. Rome pursued her purpose
with undeviating steadfastness, and displayed her energetic and
far-reaching policy--more even than on the battlefield--in the securing
of the territory which she gained by enveloping it, politically and
militarily, in a net whose meshes could not be broken.
Inaction of the Samnites
As a matter of course, the Samnites could not behold the threatening
progress of the Romans with satisfaction, and they probably put
obstacles in its way; nevertheless they neglected to intercept the new
career of conquest, while there was still perhaps time to do so, with
that energy which the circumstances required. They appear indeed in
accordance with their treaty with Rome to have occupied and strongly
garrisoned Teanum; for while in earlier times that city sought help
against Samnium from Capua and Rome, in the later struggles it appears
as the bulwark of the Samnite power on the west. They spread,
conquering and destroying, on the upper Liris, but they neglected
to establish themselves permanently in that quarter. They destroyed
the Volscian town Fregellae--by which they simply facilitated the
institution of the Roman colony there which we have just mentioned
--and they so terrified two other Volscian towns, Fabrateria (Ceccano)
and Luca (site unknown), that these, following the example of Capua,
surrendered themselves to the Romans (424). The Samnite confederacy
allowed the Roman conquest of Campania to be completed before they in
earnest opposed it; and the reason for their doing so is to be sought
partly in the contemporary hostilities between the Samnite nation and
the Italian Hellenes, but principally in the remiss and distracted
policy which the confederacy pursued.
Notes for Book II Chapter V
1. I. VII. Relation of Rome to Latium
2. The original equality of the two armies is evident from Liv. i. 52;
viii. 8, 14, and Dionys. viii, 15; but most clearly from Polyb. vi. 26.
3. Dionysius (viii. 15) expressly states, that in the later federal
treaties between Rome and Latium the Latin communities were interdicted
from calling out their contingents of their own motion and sending them
into the field alone.
4. These Latin staff-officers were the twelve -praefecti sociorum-,
who subsequently, when the old phalanx had been resolved into the
later legions and -alae-, had the charge of the two -alae- of the
federal contingents, six to each -ala-, just as the twelve war-tribunes
of the Roman army had charge of the two legions, six to each legion.
Polybius (vi. 26, 5) states that the consul nominated the former,
as he originally nominated the latter. Now, as according to the
ancient maxim of law, that every person under obligation of service
might become an officer (p. 106), it was legally allowable for the
general to appoint a Latin as leader of a Roman, as well as conversely
a Roman as leader of a Latin, legion, this led to the practical result
that the -tribuni militum- were wholly, and the -praefecti sociorum-
at least ordinarily, Romans.
5. These were the -decuriones turmarum- and -praefecti cohortium-
(Polyb. vi. 21, 5; Liv. xxv. 14; Sallust. Jug. 69, et al.) Of
course, as the Roman consuls were in law and ordinarily also in fact
commanders-in-chief, the presidents of the community in the dependent
towns also were perhaps throughout, or at least very frequently,
placed at the head of the community-contingents (Liv. xxiii. 19;
Orelli, Inscr. 7022). Indeed, the usual name given to the Latin
magistrates (-praetores-) indicates that they were officers.
6. Such a --metoikos-- was not like an actual burgess assigned to a
specific voting district once for all, but before each particular vote
the district in which the --metoeci-- were upon that occasion to vote
was fixed by lot. In reality this probably amounted to the concession
to the Latins of one vote in the Roman -comitia tributa-. As a place
in some tribe was a preliminary condition of the ordinary centuriate
suffrage, if the --metoeci-- shared in the voting in the assembly of
the centuries-which we do not know-a similar allotment must have been
fixed for the latter. In the curies they must have taken part like
the plebeians.
7. II. I. Abolition of the Life-Presidency of the Community
8. Ordinarily, as is well known, the Latin communities were
presided over by two praetors. Besides these there occur in several
communities single magistrates, who in that case bear the title of
dictator; as in Alba (Orelli-Henzen, Inscr. 2293), Tusculum (p. 445,
note 2), Lanuvium (Cicero, pro Mil. 10, 27; 17, 45; Asconius, in Mil.
p. 32, Orell.; Orelli, n. 2786, 5157, 6086); Compitum (Orelli, 3324);
Nomentum (Orelli, 208, 6138, 7032; comp. Henzen, Bullett. 1858, p.
169); and Aricia (Orelli, n. 1455). To these falls to be added the
similar dictator in the -civitas sine suffragio- of Caere (Orelli, n.
3787, 5772; also Garrucci Diss. arch., i. p. 31, although erroneously
placed after Sutrium); and further the officials of the like name at
Fidenae (Orelli, 112). All these magistracies or priesthoods that
originated in magistracies (the dictator of Caere is to be explained
in accordance with Liv. ix. 43: -Anagninis--magistratibus praeter quam
sacrorum curatione interdictum-), were annual (Orelli, 208).
The statement of Macer likewise and of the annalists who borrowed
from him, that Alba was at the time of its fall no longer under kings,
but under annual directors (Dionys. v. 74; Plutarch, Romul. 27; Liv.
i. 23), is presumably a mere inference from the institution, with
which he was acquainted, of the sacerdotal Alban dictatorship which
was beyond doubt annual like that of Nomentum; a view in which,
moreover, the democratic partisanship of its author may have come
into play. It may be a question whether the inference is valid, and
whether, even if Alba at the time of its dissolution was under rulers
holding office for life, the abolition of monarchy in Rome might not
subsequently lead to the conversion of the Alban dictatorship into
an annual office.
All these Latin magistracies substantially coincide in reality, as
well as specially in name, with the arrangement established in Rome
by the revolution in a way which is not adequately explained by the
mere similarity of the political circumstances underlying them.
9. II. IV. Etruscans Driven Back from Latium
10. The country of the Aequi embraces not merely the valley of
the Anio above Tibur and the territory of the later Latin colonies
Carsioli (on the upper part of the Turano) and Alba (on the Fucine
lake), but also the district of the later municipium of the Aequiculi,
who are nothing but that remnant of the Aequi to which, after the
subjugation by the Romans, and after the assignation of the largest
portion of the territory to Roman or Latin colonists, municipal
independence was left.
11. To all appearance Velitrae, although situated in the plain, was
originally Volscian, and so a Latin colony; Cora, on the other hand,
on the Volscian mountains, was originally Latin.
12. Not long afterwards must have taken place the founding of the
-Nemus Dianae- in the forest of Aricia, which, according to Cato's
account (p. 12, Jordan), a Tusculan dictator accomplished for
the urban communities of old Latium, Tusculum, Aricia, Lanuvium,
Laurentum, Cora, and Tibur, and of the two Latin colonies (which
therefore stand last) Suessa Pometia and Ardea (-populus Ardeatis
Rutulus-). The absence of Praeneste and of the smaller communities
of the old Latium shows, as was implied in the nature of the case,
that not all the communities of the Latin league at that time took
part in the consecration. That it falls before 372 is proved by the
emergence of Pometia (II. V. Closing Of The Latin Confederation), and
the list quite accords with what can otherwise be ascertained as to
the state of the league shortly after the accession of Ardea.
More credit may be given to the traditional statements regarding the
years of the foundations than to most of the oldest traditions, seeing
that the numbering of the year -ab urbe condita-, common to the
Italian cities, has to all appearance preserved, by direct tradition,
the year in which the colonies were founded.
13. The two do not appear as Latin colonies in the so-called Cassian
list about 372, but they so appear in the Carthaginian treaty of 406;
the towns had thus become Latin colonies in the interval.
14. In the list given by Dionysius (v. 61) of the thirty Latin
federal cities--the only list which we possess--there are named the
Ardeates, Aricini, Bovillani, Bubentani (site unknown), Corni (rather
Corani), Carventani (site unknown), Circeienses, Coriolani, Corbintes,
Cabani (perhaps the Cabenses on the Alban Mount, Bull, dell' Inst.
1861, p. 205), Fortinei (unknown), Gabini, Laurentes, Lanuvini,
Lavinates, Labicani, Nomentani, Norbani, Praenestini, Pedani,
Querquetulani (site unknown), Satricani, Scaptini, Setini, Tiburtini,
Tusculani, Tellenii (site unknown), Tolerini (site unknown), and
Veliterni. The occasional notices of communities entitled to
participate, such as of Ardea (Liv. xxxii. x), Laurentum (Liv. xxxvii.
3), Lanuvium (Liv. xli. 16), Bovillae, Gabii, Labici (Cicero, pro
Plane. 9, 23) agree with this list. Dionysius gives it on occasion
of the declaration of war by Latium against Rome in 256, and it was
natural therefore to regard--as Niebuhr did--this list as derived
from the well-known renewal of the league in 261, But, as in this list
drawn up according to the Latin alphabet the letter -g appears in a
position which it certainly had not at the time of the Twelve Tables
and scarcely came to occupy before the fifth century (see my
Unteritalische Dial. p. 33), it must be taken from a much more recent
source; and it is by far the simplest hypothesis to recognize it as
a list of those places which were afterwards regarded as the ordinary
members of the Latin confederacy, and which Dionysius in accordance
with his systematizing custom specifies as its original component
elements. As was to be expected, the list presents not a single
non-Latin community; it simply enumerates places originally Latin
or occupied by Latin colonies--no one will lay stress on Corbio and
Corioli as exceptions. Now if we compare with this list that of the
Latin colonies, there had been founded down to 372 Suessa Pometia,
Velitrae, Norba, Signia, Ardea, Circeii (361), Satricum (369), Sutrium
(371), Nepete (371), Setia (372). Of the last three founded at nearly
the same time the two Etruscan ones may very well date somewhat later
than Setia, since in fact the foundation of every town claimed
a certain amount of time, and our list cannot be free from minor
inaccuracies. If we assume this, then the list contains all the
colonies sent out up to the year 372, including the two soon
afterwards deleted from the list, Satricum destroyed in 377 and
Velitrae divested of Latin rights in 416; there are wanting only
Suessa Pometia, beyond doubt as having been destroyed before 372, and
Signia, probably because in the text of Dionysius, who mentions only
twenty-nine names, --SIGNINON-- has dropped out after --SEITINON--.
In entire harmony with this view there are absent from this list all
the Latin colonies founded after 372 as well as all places, which like
Ostia, Antemnae, Alba, were incorporated with the Roman community
before the year 370, whereas those incorporated subsequently, such
as Tusculum, Lanuvium, Velitrae, are retained in it.
As regards the list given by Pliny of thirty-two townships extinct in
his time which had formerly participated in the Alban festival, after
deduction of seven that also occur in Dionysius (for the Cusuetani
of Pliny appear to be the Carventani of Dionysius), there remain
twenty-five townships, most of them quite unknown, doubtless made up
partly of those seventeen non-voting communities--most of which perhaps
were just the oldest subsequently disqualified members of the Alban
festal league--partly of a number of other decayed or ejected members
of the league, to which latter class above all the ancient presiding
township of Alba, also named by Pliny, belonged.
15. Livy certainly states (iv. 47) that Labici became a colony in
336. But--apart from the fact that Diodorus (xiii. 6) says nothing
of it--Labici cannot have been a burgess-colony, for the town did
not lie on the coast and besides it appears subsequently as still in
possession of autonomy; nor can it have been a Latin one, for there is
not, nor can there be from the nature of these foundations, a single
other example of a Latin colony established in the original Latium.
Here as elsewhere it is most probable--especially as two -jugera- are
named as the portion of land allotted--that a public assignation to
the burgesses has been confounded with a colonial assignation ( I.
XIII. System of Joint Cultivation ).
16. II. IV. South Etruria Roman
17. II. V. League with the Hernici
18. This restriction of the ancient full reciprocity of Latin rights
first occurs in the renewal of the treaty in 416 (Liv. viii. 14); but
as the system of isolation, of which it was an essential part, first
began in reference to the Latin colonies settled after 370, and was
only generalized in 416, it is proper to mention this alteration here.
19. The name itself is very ancient; in fact it is the most
ancient indigenous name for the inhabitants of the present Calabria
(Antiochus, Fr. 5. Mull.). The well-known derivation is doubtless
an invention.
20. Perhaps no section of the Roman annals has been more disfigured
than the narrative of the first Samnite-Latin war, as it stands or
stood in Livy, Dionysius, and Appian. It runs somewhat to the
following effect. After both consuls had marched into Campania in
411, first the consul Marcus Valerius Corvus gained a severe and
bloody victory over the Samnites at Mount Gaurus; then his colleague
Aulus Cornelius Cossus gained another, after he had been rescued from
annihilation in a narrow pass by the self-devotion of a division led
by the military tribune Publius Decius. The third and decisive battle
was fought by both consuls at the entrance of the Caudine Pass near
Suessula; the Samnites were completely vanquished--forty thousand of
their shields were picked up on the field of battle--and they were
compelled to make a peace, in which the Romans retained Capua, which
had given itself over to their possession, while they left Teanum to
the Samnites (413). Congratulations came from all sides, even from
Carthage. The Latins, who had refused their contingent and seemed to
be arming against Rome, turned their arms not against Rome but against
the Paeligni, while the Romans were occupied first with a military
conspiracy of the garrison left behind in Campania (412), then with
the capture of Privernum (413) and the war against the Antiates. But
now a sudden and singular change occurred in the position of parties.
The Latins, who had demanded in vain Roman citizenship and a share in
the consulate, rose against Rome in conjunction with the Sidicines,
who had vainly offered to submit to the Romans and knew not how to
save themselves from the Samnites, and with the Campanians, who were
already tired of the Roman rule. Only the Laurentes in Latium and the
-equites- of Campania adhered to the Romans, who on their part found
support among the Paeligni and Samnites. The Latin army fell upon
Samnium; the Romano-Samnite army, after it had marched to the Fucine
lake and from thence, avoiding Latium, into Campania, fought the
decisive battle against the combined Latins and Campanians at
Vesuvius; the consul Titus Manlius Imperiosus, after he had himself
restored the wavering discipline of the army by the execution of his
own son who had slain a foe in opposition to orders from headquarters,
and after his colleague Publius Decius Mus had appeased the gods by
sacrificing his life, at length gained the victory by calling up the
last reserves. But the war was only terminated by a second battle,
in which the consul Manlius engaged the Latins and Campanians near
Trifanum; Latium and Capua submitted, and were mulcted in a portion
of their territory.
The judicious and candid reader will not fail to observe that this
report swarms with all sorts of impossibilities. Such are the
statement of the Antiates waging war after the surrender of 377 (Liv.
vi. 33); the independent campaign of the Latins against the Paeligni,
in distinct contradiction to the stipulations of the treaties between
Rome and Latium; the unprecedented march of the Roman army through the
Marsian and Samnite territory to Capua, while all Latium was in arms
against Rome; to say nothing of the equally confused and sentimental
account of the military insurrection of 412, and the story of
its forced leader, the lame Titus Quinctius, the Roman Gotz von
Berlichingen. Still more suspicious perhaps, are the repetitions.
Such is the story of the military tribune Publius Decius modelled on
the courageous deed of Marcus Calpurnius Flamma, or whatever he was
called, in the first Punic war; such is the recurrence of the conquest
of Privernum by Gaius Plautius in the year 425, which second conquest
alone is registered in the triumphal Fasti; such is the self-immolation
of Publius Decius, repeated, as is well known, in the case of his son
in 459. Throughout this section the whole representation betrays
a different period and a different hand from the other more credible
accounts of the annals. The narrative is full of detailed pictures
of battles; of inwoven anecdotes, such as that of the praetor
of Setia, who breaks his neck on the steps of the senate-house because
he had been audacious enough to solicit the consulship, and the
various anecdotes concocted out of the surname of Titus Manlius; and
of prolix and in part suspicious archaeological digressions. In this
class we include the history of the legion--of which the notice, most
probably apocryphal, in Liv. i. 52, regarding the maniples of Romans
and Latins intermingled formed by the second Tarquin, is evidently a
second fragment, the erroneous view given of the treaty between Capua
and Rome (see my Rom. Munzwesen, p. 334, n. 122); the formularies of
self-devotion, the Campanian -denarius-, the Laurentine alliance,
and the -bina jugera- in the assignation (p. 450, note). Under such
circumstances it appears a fact of great weight that Diodorus, who
follows other and often older accounts, knows absolutely nothing of
any of these events except the last battle at Trifanum; a battle
in fact that ill accords with the rest of the narrative, which, in
accordance with the rules of poetical justice, ought to have concluded
with the death of Decius.
21. II. V. Isolation of the Later Latin Cities as Respected Private
Rights
22. II. V. Crises within the Romano-Latin League
23. II. IV. South Etruria Roman
CHAPTER VI
Struggle of the Italians against Rome
Wars between the Sabellians and Tarentines--
Archidamus--
Alexander the Molossian--
While the Romans were fighting on the Liris and Volturnus, other
conflicts agitated the south-east of the peninsula. The wealthy
merchant-republic of Tarentum, daily exposed to more serious peril
from the Lucanian and Messapian bands and justly distrusting its own
sword, gained by good words and better coin the help of -condottieri-
from the mother-country. The Spartan king, Archidamus, who with
a strong band had come to the assistance of his fellow-Dorians,
succumbed to the Lucanians on the same day on which Philip conquered
at Chaeronea (416); a retribution, in the belief of the pious Greeks,
for the share which nineteen years previously he and his people had
taken in pillaging the sanctuary of Delphi. His place was taken by
an abler commander, Alexander the Molossian, brother of Olympias the
mother of Alexander the Great. In addition to the troops which he had
brought along with him he united under his banner the contingents of
the Greek cities, especially those of the Tarentines and Metapontines;
the Poediculi (around Rubi, now Ruvo), who like the Greeks found
themselves in danger from the Sabellian nation; and lastly, even the
Lucanian exiles themselves, whose considerable numbers point to the
existence of violent internal troubles in that confederacy. Thus he
soon found himself superior to the enemy. Consentia (Cosenza), which
seems to have been the federal headquarters of the Sabellians settled
in Magna Graecia, fell into his hands. In vain the Samnites came to
the help of the Lucanians; Alexander defeated their combined forces
near Paestum. He subdued the Daunians around Sipontum, and the
Messapians in the south-eastern peninsula; he already commanded from
sea to sea, and was on the point of arranging with the Romans a joint
attack on the Samnites in their native abodes. But successes so
unexpected went beyond the desires of the Tarentine merchants, and
filled them with alarm. War broke out between them and their captain,
who had come amongst them a hired mercenary and now appeared desirous
to found a Hellenic empire in the west like his nephew in the east.
Alexander had at first the advantage; he wrested Heraclea from the
Tarentines, restored Thurii, and seems to have called upon the other
Italian Greeks to unite under his protection against the Tarentines,
while he at the same time tried to bring about a peace between them
and the Sabellian tribes. But his grand projects found only feeble
support among the degenerate and desponding Greeks, and the forced
change of sides alienated from him his former Lucanian adherents: he
fell at Pandosia by the hand of a Lucanian emigrant (422).(1) On his
death matters substantially reverted to their old position. The Greek
cities found themselves once more isolated and once more left to
protect themselves as best they might by treaty or payment of tribute,
or even by extraneous aid; Croton for instance repulsed the Bruttii
about 430 with the help of the Syracusans. The Samnite tribes acquire
renewed ascendency, and were able, without troubling themselves
about the Greeks, once more to direct their eyes towards Campania
and Latium.
But there during the brief interval a prodigious change had occurred.
The Latin confederacy was broken and scattered, the last resistance
of the Volsci was overcome, the province of Campania, the richest
and finest in the peninsula, was in the undisputed and well-secured
possession of the Romans, and the second city of Italy was a
dependency of Rome. While the Greeks and Samnites were contending
with each other, Rome had almost without a contest raised herself to
a position of power which no single people in the peninsula possessed
the means of shaking, and which threatened to render all of them
subject to her yoke. A joint exertion on the part of the peoples who
were not severally a match for Rome might perhaps still burst the
chains, ere they became fastened completely. But the clearness of
perception, the courage, the self-sacrifice required for such a
coalition of numerous peoples and cities that had hitherto been for
the most part foes or at any rate strangers to each other, were not
to be found at all, or were found only when it was already too late.
Coalition of the Italians against Rome
After the fall of the Etruscan power and the weakening of the Greek
republics, the Samnite confederacy was beyond doubt, next to Rome, the
most considerable power in Italy, and at the same time that which was
most closely and immediately endangered by Roman encroachments. To
its lot therefore fell the foremost place and the heaviest burden in
the struggle for freedom and nationality which the Italians had to
wage against Rome. It might reckon upon the assistance of the small
Sabellian tribes, the Vestini, Frentani, Marrucini, and other smaller
cantons, who dwelt in rustic seclusion amidst their mountains, but
were not deaf to the appeal of a kindred stock calling them to take
up arms in defence of their common possessions. The assistance
of the Campanian Greeks and those of Magna Graecia (especially the
Tarentines), and of the powerful Lucanians and Bruttians would have
been of greater importance; but the negligence and supineness of the
demagogues ruling in Tarentum and the entanglement of that city in
the affairs of Sicily, the internal distractions of the Lucanian
confederacy, and above all the deep hostility that had subsisted
for centuries between the Greeks of Lower Italy and their Lucanian
oppressors, scarcely permitted the hope that Tarentum and Lucania
would make common cause with the Samnites. From the Sabines and the
Marsi, who were the nearest neighbours of the Romans and had long
lived in peaceful relations with Rome, little more could be expected
than lukewarm sympathy or neutrality. The Apulians, the ancient and
bitter antagonists of the Sabellians, were the natural allies of the
Romans. On the other hand it might be expected that the more remote
Etruscans would join the league if a first success were gained; and
even a revolt in Latium and the land of the Volsci and Hernici was
not impossible. But the Samnites--the Aetolians of Italy, in whom
national vigour still lived unimpaired--had mainly to rely on their
own energies for such perseverance in the unequal struggle as would
give the other peoples time for a generous sense of shame, for calm
deliberation, and for the mustering of their forces; a single success
might then kindle the flames of war and insurrection all around Rome.
History cannot but do the noble people the justice of acknowledging
that they understood and performed their duty.
Outbreak of War between Samnium and Rome--
Pacification of Campania
Differences had already for several years existed between Rome and
Samnium in consequence of the continual aggressions in which the
Romans indulged on the Liris, and of which the founding of Fregellae
in 426 was the latest and most important. But it was the Greeks of
Campania that gave occasion to the outbreak of the contest. After
Cumae and Capua had become Roman, nothing so naturally suggested
itself to the Romans as the subjugation of the Greek city Neapolis,
which ruled also over the Greek islands in the bay--the only town
not yet reduced to subjection within the field of the Roman power.
The Tarentines and Samnites, informed of the scheme of the Romans to
obtain possession of the town, resolved to anticipate them; and while
the Tarentines were too remiss perhaps rather than too distant for the
execution of this plan, the Samnites actually threw into it a strong
garrison. The Romans immediately declared war nominally against the
Neapolitans, really against the Samnites (427), and began the siege
of Neapolis. After it had lasted a while, the Campanian Greeks
became weary of the disturbance of their commerce and of the foreign
garrison; and the Romans, whose whole efforts were directed to keep
states of the second and third rank by means of separate treaties
aloof from the coalition which was about to be formed, hastened, as
soon as the Greeks consented to negotiate, to offer them the most
favourable terms--full equality of rights and exemption from land
service, equal alliance and perpetual peace. Upon these conditions,
after the Neapolitans had rid themselves of the garrison by stratagem,
a treaty was concluded (428).
The Sabellian towns to the south of the Volturnus, Nola, Nuceria,
Herculaneum, and Pompeii, took part with Samnium in the beginning of
the war; but their greatly exposed situation and the machinations of
the Romans--who endeavoured to bring over to their side the optimate
party in these towns by all the levers of artifice and self-interest,
and found a powerful support to their endeavours in the precedent of
Capua--induced these towns to declare themselves either in favour of
Rome or neutral not long after the fall of Neapolis.
Alliance between the Romans and Lucanians
A still more important success befell the Romans in Lucania. There
also the people with true instinct was in favour of joining the
Samnites; but, as an alliance with the Samnites involved peace with
Tarentum and a large portion of the governing lords of Lucania were
not disposed to suspend their profitable pillaging expeditions, the
Romans succeeded in concluding an alliance with Lucania--an alliance
which was invaluable, because it provided employment for the
Tarentines and thus left the whole power of Rome available
against Samnium.
War in Samnium--
The Caudine Pass and the Caudine Peace
Thus Samnium stood on all sides unsupported; excepting that some of
the eastern mountain districts sent their contingents. In the year
428 the war began within the Samnite land itself: some towns on the
Campanian frontier, Rufrae (between Venafrum and Teanum) and Allifae,
were occupied by the Romans. In the following years the Roman armies
penetrated Samnium, fighting and pillaging, as far as the territory of
the Vestini, and even as far as Apulia, where they were received with
open arms; everywhere they had very decidedly the advantage.
The courage of the Samnites was broken; they sent back the Roman
prisoners, and along with them the dead body of the leader of the war
party, Brutulus Papius, who had anticipated the Roman executioners,
when the Samnite national assembly determined to ask the enemy for
peace and to procure for themselves more tolerable terms by the
surrender of their bravest general. But when the humble, almost
suppliant, request was not listened to by the Roman people (432),
the Samnites, under their new general Gavius Pontius, prepared for the
utmost and most desperate resistance. The Roman army, which under the
two consuls of the following year (433) Spurius Postumius and Titus
Veturius was encamped near Calatia (between Caserta and Maddaloni),
received accounts, confirmed by the affirmation of numerous captives,
that the Samnites had closely invested Luceria, and that that
important town, on which depended the possession of Apulia, was
in great danger. They broke up in haste. If they wished to arrive in
good time, no other route could be taken than through the midst of the
enemy's territory--where afterwards, in continuation of the Appian
Way, the Roman road was constructed from Capua by way of Beneventum
to Apulia. This route led, between the present villages of Arpaja
and Montesarchio (Caudium), through a watery meadow, which was wholly
enclosed by high and steep wooded hills and was only accessible
through deep defiles at the entrance and outlet. Here the Samnites
had posted themselves in ambush. The Romans, who had entered the
valley unopposed, found its outlet obstructed by abattis and strongly
occupied; on marching back they saw that the entrance was similarly
closed, while at the same time the crests of the surrounding mountains
were crowned by Samnite cohorts. They perceived, when it was too
late, that they had suffered themselves to be misled by a stratagem,
and that the Samnites awaited them, not at Luceria, but in the fatal
pass of Caudium. They fought, but without hope of success and without
earnest aim; the Roman army was totally unable to manoeuvre and was
completely vanquished without a struggle. The Roman generals offered
to capitulate. It is only a foolish rhetoric that represents the
Samnite general as shut up to the simple alternatives of disbanding or
of slaughtering the Roman army; he could not have done better than
accept the offered capitulation and make prisoners of the hostile
army--the whole force which for the moment the Roman community could
bring into action--with both its commanders-in-chief. In that case
the way to Campania and Latium would have stood open; and in the then
existing state of feeling, when the Volsci and Hernici and the larger
portion of the Latins would have received him with open arms, the
political existence of Rome would have been in serious danger. But
instead of taking this course and concluding a military convention,
Gavius Pontius thought that he could at once terminate the whole
quarrel by an equitable peace; whether it was that he shared that
foolish longing of the confederates for peace, to which Brutulus
Papius had fallen a victim in the previous year, or whether it was
that he was unable to prevent the party which was tired of the war
from spoiling his unexampled victory. The terms laid down were
moderate enough; Rome was to raze the fortresses which she had
constructed in defiance of the treaty--Cales and Fregellae--and to
renew her equal alliance with Samnium. After the Roman generals had
agreed to these terms and had given six hundred hostages chosen from
the cavalry for their faithful execution--besides pledging their own
word and that of all their staff-officers on oath to the same effect
--the Roman army was dismissed uninjured, but disgraced; for the
Samnite army, drunk with victory, could not resist the desire to
subject their hated enemies to the disgraceful formality of laying
down their arms and passing under the yoke.
But the Roman senate, regardless of the oath of their officers and
of the fate of the hostages, cancelled the agreement, and contented
themselves with surrendering to the enemy those who had concluded it
as personally responsible for its fulfilment. Impartial history can
attach little importance to the question whether in so doing the
casuistry of Roman advocates and priests kept the letter of the law,
or whether the decree of the Roman senate violated it; under a human
and political point of view no blame in this matter rests upon the
Romans. It was a question of comparative indifference whether,
according to the formal state law of the Romans, the general in
command was or was not entitled to conclude peace without reserving
its ratification by the burgesses. According to the spirit and
practice of the constitution it was quite an established principle
that in Rome every state-agreement, not purely military, pertained
to the province of the civil authorities, and a general who concluded
peace without the instructions of the senate and the burgesses
exceeded his powers. It was a greater error on the part of the
Samnite general to give the Roman generals the choice between saving
their army and exceeding their powers, than it was on the part of
the latter that they had not the magnanimity absolutely to repel such
a suggestion; and it was right and necessary that the Roman senate
should reject such an agreement. A great nation does not surrender
what it possesses except under the pressure of extreme necessity: all
treaties making concessions are acknowledgments of such a necessity,
not moral obligations. If every people justly reckons it a point
of honour to tear to pieces by force of arms treaties that are
disgraceful, how could honour enjoin a patient adherence to a
convention like the Caudine to which an unfortunate general was
morally compelled, while the sting of the recent disgrace was
keenly felt and the vigour of the nation subsisted unimpaired?
Victory of the Romans
Thus the convention of Caudium did not produce the rest which the
enthusiasts for peace in Samnium had foolishly expected from it, but
only led to war after war with exasperation aggravated on either side
by the opportunity forfeited, by the breach of a solemn engagement,
by military honour disgraced, and by comrades that had been abandoned.
The Roman officers given up were not received by the Samnites, partly
because they were too magnanimous to wreak their vengeance on those
unfortunates, partly because they would thereby have admitted the
Roman plea that the agreement bound only those who swore to it, not
the Roman state. Magnanimously they spared even the hostages whose
lives had been forfeited by the rules of war, and preferred to resort
at once to arms.
Luceria was occupied by them and Fregellae surprised and taken by
assault (434) before the Romans had reorganized their broken army;
the passing of the Satricans(2) over to the Samnites shows what they
might have accomplished, had they not allowed their advantage to slip
through their hands. But Rome was only momentarily paralyzed, not
weakened; full of shame and indignation the Romans raised all the
men and means they could, and placed the highly experienced Lucius
Papirius Cursor, equally distinguished as a soldier and as a general,
at the head of the newly formed army. The army divided; the one-half
marched by Sabina and the Adriatic coast to appear before Luceria,
the other proceeded to the same destination through Samnium itself,
successfully engaging and driving before it the Samnite army. They
formed a junction again under the walls of Luceria, the siege of which
was prosecuted with the greater zeal, because the Roman equites lay
in captivity there; the Apulians, particularly the Arpani, lent the
Romans important assistance in the siege, especially by procuring
supplies. After the Samnites had given battle for the relief of
the town and been defeated, Luceria surrendered to the Romans (435).
Papirius enjoyed the double satisfaction of liberating his comrades
who had been given up for lost, and of requiting the yoke of Caudium
on the Samnite garrison of Luceria. In the next years (435-437)
the war was carried on(3) not so much in Samnium itself as in the
adjoining districts. In the first place the Romans chastised the
allies of the Samnites in the Apulian and Frentanian territories,
and concluded new conventions with the Teanenses of Apulia and the
Canusini. At the same time Satricum was again reduced to subjection
and severely punished for its revolt. Then the war turned to
Campania, where the Romans conquered the frontier town towards
Samnium, Saticula (perhaps S. Agata de' Goti) (438). But now
the fortune of war seemed disposed once more to turn against them.
The Samnites gained over the Nucerians (438), and soon afterwards
the Nolans, to their side; on the upper Liris the Sorani of themselves
expelled the Roman garrison (439); the Ausonians were preparing to
rise, and threatened the important Cales; even in Capua the party
opposed to Rome was vigorously stirring. A Samnite army advanced into
Campania and encamped before the city, in the hope that its vicinity
might place the national party in the ascendant (440). But Sora was
immediately attacked by the Romans and recaptured after the defeat
of a Samnite relieving force (440). The movements among the Ausonians
were suppressed with cruel rigour ere the insurrection fairly broke
out, and at the same time a special dictator was nominated to
institute and decide political processes against the leaders of
the Samnite party in Capua, so that the most illustrious of them
died a voluntary death to escape from the Roman executioner (440).
The Samnite army before Capua was defeated and compelled to retreat
from Campania; the Romans, following close at the heels of the enemy,
crossed the Matese and encamped in the winter of 440 before Bovianum,
the: capital of Samnium. Nola was abandoned by its allies; and the
Romans had the sagacity to detach the town for ever from the Samnite
party by a very favourable convention, similar to that concluded with
Neapolis (441). Fregellae, which after the catastrophe of Caudium had
fallen into the hands of the party adverse to Rome and had been their
chief stronghold in the district on the Liris, finally fell in the
eighth year after its occupation by the Samnites (441); two hundred of
the citizens, the chief members of the national party, were conveyed
to Rome, and there openly beheaded in the Forum as an example and a
warning to the patriots who were everywhere bestirring themselves.
New Fortresses in Apulia and Campania
Apulia and Campania were thus in the hands of the Romans. In order
finally to secure and permanently to command the conquered territory,
several new fortresses were founded in it during the years 440-442:
Luceria in Apulia, to which on account of its isolated and exposed
situation half a legion was sent as a permanent garrison; Pontiae (the
Ponza islands) for the securing of the Campanian waters; Saticula on
the Campano-Samnite frontier, as a bulwark against Samnium; and lastly
Interamna (near Monte Cassino) and Suessa Aurunca (Sessa) on the
road from Rome to Capua. Garrisons moreover were sent to Caiatia
(Cajazzo), Sora, and other stations of military importance. The great
military road from Rome to Capua, which with the necessary embankment
for it across the Pomptine marshes the censor Appius Claudius caused
to be constructed in 442, completed the securing of Campania. The
designs of the Romans were more and more fully developed; their object
was the subjugation of Italy, which was enveloped more closely from
year to year in a network of Roman fortresses and roads. The Samnites
were already on both sides surrounded by the Roman meshes; already the
line from Rome to Luceria severed north and south Italy from each
other, as the fortresses of Norba and Signia had formerly severed the
Volsci and Aequi; and Rome now rested on the Arpani, as it formerly
rested on the Hernici. The Italians could not but see that the
freedom of all of them was gone if Samnium succumbed, and that it was
high time at length to hasten with all their might to the help of the
brave mountain people which had now for fifteen years singly sustained
the unequal struggle with the Romans.
Intervention of the Tarentines
The most natural allies of the Samnites would have been the
Tarentines; but it was part of that fatality that hung over Samnium
and over Italy in general, that at this moment so fraught with the
destinies of the future the decision lay in the hands of these
Athenians of Italy. Since the constitution of Tarentum, which was
originally after the old Doric fashion strictly aristocratic, had
become changed to a complete democracy, a life of singular activity
had sprung up in that city, which was inhabited chiefly by mariners,
fishermen, and artisans. The sentiments and conduct of the
population, more wealthy than noble, discarded all earnestness
amidst the giddy bustle and witty brilliance of their daily life, and
oscillated between the grandest boldness of enterprise and elevation
of spirit on the one hand, and a shameful frivolity and childish whim
on the other. It may not be out of place, in connection with a crisis
wherein the existence or destruction of nations of noble gifts and
ancient renown was at stake, to mention that Plato, who came to
Tarentum some sixty years before this time, according to his own
statement saw the whole city drunk at the Dionysia, and that the
burlesque farce, or "merry tragedy" as it was called, was created
in Tarentum about the very time of the great Samnite war. This
licentious life and buffoon poetry of the Tarentine fashionables and
literati had a fitting counterpart in the inconstant, arrogant, and
short-sighted policy of the Tarentine demagogues, who regularly
meddled in matters with which they had nothing to do, and kept aloof
where their immediate interests called for action. After the Caudine
catastrophe, when the Romans and Samnites stood opposed in Apulia,
they had sent envoys thither to enjoin both parties to lay down their
arms (434). This diplomatic intervention in the decisive struggle of
the Italians could not rationally have any other meaning than that of
an announcement that Tarentum had at length resolved to abandon
the neutrality which it had hitherto maintained. It had in fact
sufficient reason to do so. It was no doubt a difficult and dangerous
thing for Tarentum to be entangled in such a war; for the democratic
development of the state had directed its energies entirely to the
fleet, and while that fleet, resting upon the strong commercial
marine of Tarentum, held the first rank among the maritime powers
of Magna Graecia, the land force, on which they were in the present
case dependent, consisted mainly of hired soldiers and was sadly
disorganized. Under these circumstances it was no light undertaking
for the Tarentine republic to take part in the conflict between Rome
and Samnium, even apart from the--at least troublesome--feud in which
Roman policy had contrived to involve them with the Lucanians. But
these obstacles might be surmounted by an energetic will; and both the
contending parties construed the summons of the Tarentine envoys that
they should desist from the strife as meant in earnest. The Samnites,
as the weaker, showed themselves ready to comply with it; the Romans
replied by hoisting the signal for battle. Reason and honour dictated
to the Tarentines the propriety of now following up the haughty
injunction of their envoys by a declaration of war against Rome; but
in Tarentum neither reason nor honour characterized the government,
and they had simply been trifling in a very childish fashion with
very serious matters. No declaration of war against Rome took place;
in its stead they preferred to support the oligarchical party in the
Sicilian towns against Agathocles of Syracuse who had at a former
period been in the Tarentine service and had been dismissed in
disgrace, and following the example of Sparta, they sent a fleet
to the island--a fleet which would have rendered better service
in the Campanian seas (440).
Accession of the Etruscans to the Coalition--
Victory at the Vadimonian Lake
The peoples of northern and central Italy, who seem to have been
roused especially by the establishment of the fortress of Luceria,
acted with more energy. The Etruscans first drew the sword (443), the
armistice of 403 having already expired some years before. The Roman
frontier-fortress of Sutrium had to sustain a two years' siege, and in
the vehement conflicts which took place under its walls the Romans as
a rule were worsted, till the consul of the year 444 Quintus Fabius
Rullianus, a leader who had gained experience in the Samnite wars, not
only restored the ascendency of the Roman arms in Roman Etruria, but
boldly penetrated into the land of the Etruscans proper, which had
hitherto from diversity of language and scanty means of communication
remained almost unknown to the Romans. His march through the Ciminian
Forest which no Roman army had yet traversed, and his pillaging of a
rich region that had long been spared the horrors of war, raised
all Etruria in arms. The Roman government, which had seriously
disapproved the rash expedition and had when too late forbidden the
daring leader from crossing the frontier, collected in the greatest
haste new legions, in order to meet the expected onslaught of the
whole Etruscan power. But a seasonable and decisive victory of
Rullianus, the battle at the Vadimonian lake which long lived in
the memory of the people, converted an imprudent enterprise into a
celebrated feat of heroism and broke the resistance of the Etruscans.
Unlike the Samnites who had now for eighteen years maintained the
unequal struggle, three of the most powerful Etruscan towns--Perusia,
Cortona, and Arretium--consented after the first defeat to a separate
peace for three hundred months (444), and after the Romans had once
more beaten the other Etruscans near Perusia in the following year,
the Tarquinienses also agreed to a peace of four hundred months (446);
whereupon the other cities desisted from the contest, and a temporary
cessation of arms took place throughout Etruria.
Last Campaigns in Samnium
While these events were passing, the war had not been suspended in
Samnium. The campaign of 443 was confined like the preceding to the
besieging and storming of several strongholds of the Samnites; but
in the next year the war took a more vigorous turn. The dangerous
position of Rullianus in Etruria, and the reports which spread as
to the annihilation of the Roman army in the north, encouraged the
Samnites to new exertions; the Roman consul Gaius Marcius Rutilus was
vanquished by them and severely wounded in person. But the sudden
change in the aspect of matters in Etruria destroyed their newly
kindled hopes. Lucius Papirius Cursor again appeared at the head of
the Roman troops sent against the Samnites, and again remained the
victor in a great and decisive battle (445), in which the confederates
had put forth their last energies. The flower of their army--the
wearers of the striped tunics and golden shields, and the wearers of
the white tunics and silver shields--were there extirpated, and their
splendid equipments thenceforth on festal occasions decorated the rows
of shops along the Roman Forum. Their distress was ever increasing;
the struggle was becoming ever more hopeless. In the following year
(446) the Etruscans laid down their arms; and in the same year the
last town of Campania which still adhered to the Samnites, Nuceria,
simultaneously assailed on the part of the Romans by water and by
land, surrendered under favourable conditions. The Samnites found new
allies in the Umbrians of northern, and in the Marsi and Paeligni of
central, Italy, and numerous volunteers even from the Hernici joined
their ranks; but movements which might have decidedly turned the scale
against Rome, had the Etruscans still remained under arms, now simply
augmented the results of the Roman victory without seriously adding to
its difficulties. The Umbrians, who gave signs of marching on Rome,
were intercepted by Rullianus with the army of Samnium on the upper
Tiber--a step which the enfeebled Samnites were unable to prevent;
and this sufficed to disperse the Umbrian levies. The war once more
returned to central Italy. The Paeligni were conquered, as were also
the Marsi; and, though the other Sabellian tribes remained nominally
foes of Rome, in this quarter Samnium gradually came to stand
practically alone. But unexpected assistance came to them from
the district of the Tiber. The confederacy of the Hernici, called
by the Romans to account for their countrymen found among the Samnite
captives, now declared war against Rome (in 448)--more doubtless from
despair than from calculation. Some of the more considerable Hernican
communities from the first kept aloof from hostilities; but Anagnia,
by far the most eminent of the Hernican cities, carried out this
declaration of war. In a military point of view the position of the
Romans was undoubtedly rendered for the moment highly critical by this
unexpected rising in the rear of the army occupied with the siege of
the strongholds of Samnium. Once more the fortune of war favoured the
Samnites; Sora and Caiatia fell into their hands. But the Anagnines
succumbed with unexpected rapidity before troops despatched from Rome,
and these troops also gave seasonable relief to the army stationed
in Samnium: all in fact was lost. The Samnites sued for peace, but
in vain; they could not yet come to terms. The final decision was
reserved for the campaign of 449. Two Roman consular armies
penetrated--the one, under Tiberius Minucius and after his fall under
Marcus Fulvius, from Campania through the mountain passes, the other,
under Lucius Postumius, from the Adriatic upwards by the Biferno--into
Samnium, there to unite in front of Bovianum the capital; a decisive
victory was achieved, the Samnite general Statius Gellius was taken
prisoner, and Bovianum was carried by storm.
Peace with Samnium
The fall of the chief stronghold of the land terminated the twenty-two
years' war. The Samnites withdrew their garrisons from Sora and
Arpinum, and sent envoys to Rome to sue for peace; the Sabellian
tribes, the Marsi, Marrucini, Paeligni, Frentani, Vestini, and
Picentes followed their example. The terms granted by Rome were
tolerable; cessions of territory were required from some of them,
from the Paeligni for instance, but they do not seem to have been of
much importance. The equal alliance was renewed between the Sabellian
tribes and the Romans (450).
And with Tarentum
Presumably about the same time, and in consequence doubtless of the
Samnite peace, peace was also made between Rome and Tarentum. The two
cities had not indeed directly opposed each other in the field. The
Tarentines had been inactive spectators of the long contest between
Rome and Samnium from its beginning to its close, and had only kept up
hostilities in league with the Sallentines against the Lucanians who
were allies of Rome. In the last years of the Samnite war no doubt
they had shown some signs of more energetic action. The position of
embarrassment to which the ceaseless attacks of the Lucanians reduced
them on the one hand, and on the other hand the feeling ever obtruding
itself on them more urgently that the complete subjugation of Samnium
would endanger their own independence, induced them, notwithstanding
their unpleasant experiences with Alexander, once more to entrust
themselves to a -condottiere-. There came at their call the Spartan
prince Cleonymus, accompanied by five thousand mercenaries; with whom
he united a band equally numerous raised in Italy, as well as the
contingents of the Messapians and of the smaller Greek towns, and
above all the Tarentine civic army of twenty-two thousand men. At
the head of this considerable force he compelled the Lucanians to make
peace with Tarentum and to install a government of Samnite tendencies;
in return for which Metapontum was abandoned to them. The Samnites
were still in arms when this occurred; there was nothing to prevent
the Spartan from coming to their aid and casting the weight of his
numerous army and his military skill into the scale in favour of
freedom for the cities and peoples of Italy. But Tarentum did not
act as Rome would in similar circumstances have acted; and prince
Cleonymus himself was far from being an Alexander or a Pyrrhus. He
was in no hurry to undertake a war in which he might expect more blows
than booty, but preferred to make common cause with the Lucanians
against Metapontum, and made himself comfortable in that city, while
he talked of an expedition against Agathocles of Syracuse and of
liberating the Sicilian Greeks. Thereupon the Samnites made peace;
and when after its conclusion Rome began to concern herself more
seriously about the south-east of the peninsula--in token of which
in the year 447 a Roman force levied contributions, or rather
reconnoitred by order of the government, in the territory of the
Sallentines--the Spartan -condottiere- embarked with his mercenaries
and surprised the island of Corcyra, which was admirably situated as
a basis for piratical expeditions against Greece and Italy. Thus
abandoned by their general, and at the same time deprived of their
allies in central Italy, the Tarentines and their Italian allies,
the Lucanians and Sallentines, had now no course left but to solicit
an accommodation with Rome, which appears to have been granted on
tolerable terms. Soon afterwards (451) even an incursion of
Cleonymus, who had landed in the Sallentine territory and laid
siege to Uria, was repulsed by the inhabitants with Roman aid.
Consolidation of the Roman Rule in Central Italy
The victory of Rome was complete; and she turned it to full account.
It was not from magnanimity in the conquerors--for the Romans knew
nothing of the sort--but from shrewd and far-seeing calculation that
terms so moderate were granted to the Samnites, the Tarentines, and
the more distant peoples generally. The first and main object was not
so much to compel southern Italy as quickly as possible to recognize
formally the Roman supremacy, as to supplement and complete the
subjugation of central Italy, for which the way had been prepared by
the military roads and fortresses already established in Campania and
Apulia during the last war, and by that means to separate the northern
and southern Italians into two masses cut off in a military point of
view from direct contact with each other. To this object accordingly
the next undertakings of the Romans were with consistent energy
directed. Above all they used, or made, the opportunity for getting
rid of the confederacies of the Aequi and the Hernici which had once
been rivals of the Roman single power in the region of the Tiber and
were not yet quite set aside. In the same year, in which the peace
with Samnium took place (450), the consul Publius Sempronius Sophus
waged war on the Aequi; forty townships surrendered in fifty days; the
whole territory with the exception of the narrow and rugged mountain
valley, which still in the present day bears the old name of the
people (Cicolano), passed into the possession of the Romans, and here
on the northern border of the Fucine lake was founded the fortress
Alba with a garrison of 6000 men, thenceforth forming a bulwark
against the valiant Marsi and a curb for central Italy; as was also
two years afterwards on the upper Turano, nearer to Rome, Carsioli
--both as allied communities with Latin rights.
The fact that in the case of the Hernici at least Anagnia had taken
part in the last stage of the Samnite war, furnished the desired
reason for dissolving the old relation of alliance. The fate of the
Anagnines was, as might be expected, far harder than that which had
under similar circumstances been meted out to the Latin communities
in the previous generation. They not merely had, like these, to
acquiesce in the Roman citizenship without suffrage, but they also
like the Caerites lost self-administration; out of a portion of their
territory on the upper Trerus (Sacco), moreover, a new tribe was
instituted, and another was formed at the same time on the lower Anio
(455). The only regret was that the three Hernican communities next
in importance to Anagnia, Aletrium, Verulae, and Ferentinum, had not
also revolted; for, as they courteously declined the suggestion that
they should voluntarily enter into the bond of Roman citizenship and
there existed no pretext for compelling them to do so, the Romans were
obliged not only to respect their autonomy, but also to allow to them
even the right of assembly and of intermarriage, and in this way
still to leave a shadow of the old Hernican confederacy. No such
considerations fettered their action in that portion of the Volscian
country which had hitherto been held by the Samnites. There Arpinum
and Frusino became subject, the latter town was deprived of a third
of its domain, and on the upper Liris in addition to Fregellae the
Volscian town of Sora, which had previously been garrisoned, was now
permanently converted into a Roman fortress and occupied by a legion
of 4000 men. In this way the old Volscian territory was completely
subdued, and became rapidly Romanized. The region which separated
Samnium from Etruria was penetrated by two military roads, both of
which were secured by new fortresses. The northern road, which
afterwards became the Flaminian, covered the line of the Tiber; it
led through Ocriculum, which was in alliance with Rome, to Narnia, the
name which the Romans gave to the old Umbrian fortress Nequinum when
they settled a military colony there (455). The southern, afterwards
the Valerian, ran along the Fucine lake by way of the just mentioned
fortresses of Carsioli and Alba. The small tribes within whose bounds
these colonies were instituted, the Umbrians who obstinately defended
Nequinum, the Aequians who once more assailed Alba, and the Marsians
who attacked Carsioli, could not arrest the course of Rome: the two
strong curb-fortresses were inserted almost without hindrance between
Samnium and Etruria. We have already mentioned the great roads and
fortresses instituted for permanently securing Apulia and above all
Campania: by their means Samnium was further surrounded on the east
and west with the net of Roman strongholds. It is a significant
token of the comparative weakness of Etruria that it was not deemed
necessary to secure the passes through the Ciminian Forest in a
similar mode--by a highway and corresponding fortresses. The former
frontier fortress of Sutrium continued to be in this quarter the
terminus of the Roman military line, and the Romans contented
themselves with having the road leading thence to Arretium kept
in a serviceable state for military purposes by the communities
through whose territories it passed.(4)
Renewed Outbreak of the Samnite-Etruscan War--
Junction of the Troops of the Coalition in Etruria
The high-spirited Samnite nation perceived that such a peace was more
ruinous than the most destructive war; and, what was more, it acted
accordingly. The Celts in northern Italy were just beginning to
bestir themselves again after a long suspension of warfare; moreover
several Etruscan communities there were still in arms against the
Romans, and brief armistices alternated in that quarter with vehement
but indecisive conflicts. All central Italy was still in ferment and
partly in open insurrection; the fortresses were still only in course
of construction; the way between Etruria and Samnium was not yet
completely closed. Perhaps it was not yet too late to save freedom;
but, if so, there must be no delay; the difficulty of attack
increased, the power of the assailants diminished with every year
by which the peace was prolonged. Five years had scarce elapsed since
the contest ended, and all the wounds must still have been bleeding
which the twenty-two years' war had inflicted on the peasantry of
Samnium, when in the year 456 the Samnite confederacy renewed the
struggle. The last war had been decided in favour of Rome mainly
through the alliance of Lucania with the Romans and the consequent
standing aloof of Tarentum. The Samnites, profiting by that lesson,
now threw themselves in the first instance with all their might on the
Lucanians, and succeeded in bringing their party in that quarter to
the helm of affairs, and in concluding an alliance between Samnium and
Lucania. Of course the Romans immediately declared war; the Samnites
had expected no other issue. It is a significant indication of the
state of feeling, that the Samnite government informed the Roman
envoys that it was not able to guarantee their inviolability, if
they should set foot on Samnite ground.
The war thus began anew (456), and while a second army was fighting
in Etruria, the main Roman army traversed Samnium and compelled the
Lucanians to make peace and send hostages to Rome. The following
year both consuls were able to proceed to Samnium; Rullianus conquered
at Tifernum, his faithful comrade in arms, Publius Decius Mus, at
Maleventum, and for five months two Roman armies encamped in the land
of the enemy. They were enabled to do so, because the Tuscan states
had on their own behalf entered into negotiations for peace with Rome.
The Samnites, who from the beginning could not but see that their only
chance of victory lay in the combination of all Italy against Rome,
exerted themselves to the utmost to prevent the threatened separate
peace between Etruria and Rome; and when at last their general,
Gellius Egnatius, offered to bring aid to the Etruscans in their own
country, the Etruscan federal council in reality agreed to hold out
and once more to appeal to the decision of arms. Samnium made the
most energetic efforts to place three armies simultaneously in the
field, the first destined for the defence of its own territory, the
second for an invasion of Campania, the third and most numerous
for Etruria; and in the year 458 the last, led by Egnatius himself,
actually reached Etruria in safety through the Marsian and Umbrian
territories, with whose inhabitants there was an understanding.
Meanwhile the Romans were capturing some strong places in Samnium and
breaking the influence of the Samnite party in Lucania; they were not
in a position to prevent the departure of the army led by Egnatius.
When information reached Rome that the Samnites had succeeded in
frustrating all the enormous efforts made to sever the southern
from the northern Italians, that the arrival of the Samnite bands in
Etruria had become the signal for an almost universal rising against
Rome, and that the Etruscan communities were labouring with the utmost
zeal to get their own forces ready for war and to take into their pay
Gallic bands, every nerve was strained also in Rome; the freedmen and
the married were formed into cohorts--it was felt on all hands that
the decisive crisis was near. The year 458 however passed away,
apparently, in armings and marchings. For the following year (459)
the Romans placed their two best generals, Publius Decius Mus and the
aged Quintus Fabius Rullianus, at the head of their army in Etruria,
which was reinforced with all the troops that could be spared from
Campania, and amounted to at least 60,000 men, of whom more than a
third were full burgesses of Rome. Besides this, two reserves were
formed, the first at Falerii, the second under the walls of the
capital. The rendezvous of the Italians was Umbria, towards which the
roads from the Gallic, Etruscan, and Sabellian territories converged;
towards Umbria the consuls also moved off their main force, partly
along the left, partly along the right bank of the Tiber, while at
the same time the first reserve made a movement towards Etruria, in
order if possible to recall the Etruscan troops from the main scene
of action for the defence of their homes. The first engagement did
not prove fortunate for the Romans; their advanced guard was defeated
by the combined Gauls and Samnites in the district of Chiusi. But
that diversion accomplished its object. Less magnanimous than the
Samnites, who had marched through the ruins of their towns that they
might not be absent from the chosen field of battle, a great part of
the Etruscan contingents withdrew from the federal army on the news
of the advance of the Roman reserve into Etruria, and its ranks
were greatly thinned when the decisive battle came to be fought on
the eastern declivity of the Apennines near Sentinum.
Battle of Sentinum--
Peace with Etruria
Nevertheless it was a hotly contested day. On the right wing of
the Romans, where Rullianus with his two legions fought against the
Samnite army, the conflict remained long undecided. On the left,
which Publius Decius commanded, the Roman cavalry was thrown into
confusion by the Gallic war chariots, and the legions also already
began to give way. Then the consul called to him Marcus Livius the
priest, and bade him devote to the infernal gods both the head of
the Roman general and the army of the enemy; and plunging into the
thickest throng of the Gauls he sought death and found it. This
heroic deed of despair on the part of one so eminent as a man and so
beloved as a general was not in vain. The fugitive soldiers rallied;
the bravest threw themselves after their leader into the hostile
ranks, to avenge him or to die with him; and just at the right moment
the consular Lucius Scipio, despatched by Rullianus, appeared with the
Roman reserve on the imperilled left wing. The excellent Campanian
cavalry, which fell on the flank and rear of the Gauls, turned the
scale; the Gauls fled, and at length the Samnites also gave way,
their general Egnatius falling at the gate of the camp. Nine thousand
Romans strewed the field of battle; but dearly as the victory was
purchased, it was worthy of such a sacrifice. The army of the
coalition was dissolved, and with it the coalition itself; Umbria
remained in the power of the Romans, the Gauls dispersed, the remnant
of the Samnites still in compact order retreated homeward through the
Abruzzi. Campania, which the Samnites had overrun during the Etruscan
war, was after its close re-occupied with little difficulty by the
Romans. Etruria sued for peace in the following year (460); Volsinii,
Perusia, Arretium, and in general all the towns that had joined the
league against Rome, promised a cessation of hostilities for four
hundred months.
Last Struggles of Samnium
But the Samnites were of a different mind; they prepared for their
hopeless resistance with the courage of free men, which cannot
compel success but may put it to shame. When the two consular armies
advanced into Samnium, in the year 460, they encountered everywhere
the most desperate resistance; in fact Marcus Atilius was discomfited
near Luceria, and the Samnites were able to penetrate into Campania
and to lay waste the territory of the Roman colony Interamna on the
Liris. In the ensuing year Lucius Papirius Cursor, the son of the
hero of the first Samnite war, and Spurius Carvilius, gave battle on
a great scale near Aquilonia to the Samnite army, the flower of which
--the 16,000 in white tunics--had sworn a sacred oath to prefer death
to flight. Inexorable destiny, however, heeds neither the oaths nor
the supplications of despair; the Roman conquered and stormed the
strongholds where the Samnites had sought refuge for themselves and
their property. Even after this great defeat the confederates still
for years resisted the ever-increasing superiority of the enemy with
unparalleled perseverance in their fastnesses and mountains, and still
achieved various isolated advantages. The experienced arm of the old
Rullianus was once more called into the field against them (462), and
Gavius Pontius, a son perhaps of the victor of Caudium, even gained
for his nation a last victory, which the Romans meanly enough avenged
by causing him when subsequently taken to be executed in prison (463).
But there was no further symptom of movement in Italy; for the war,
which Falerii began in 461, scarcely deserves such a name. The
Samnites doubtless turned with longing eyes towards Tarentum, which
alone was still in a position to grant them aid; but it held aloof.
The same causes as before occasioned its inaction--internal
misgovernment, and the passing over of the Lucanians once more to the
Roman party in the year 456; to which fell to be added a not unfounded
dread of Agathocles of Syracuse, who just at that time had reached the
height of his power and began to turn his views towards Italy.
About 455 the latter established himself in Corcyra whence Cleonymus
had been expelled by Demetrius Poliorcetes, and now threatened the
Tarentines from the Adriatic as well as from the Ionian sea.
The cession of the island to king Pyrrhus of Epirus in 459 certainly
removed to a great extent the apprehensions which they had cherished;
but the affairs of Corcyra continued to occupy the Tarentines--in the
year 464, for instance, they helped to protect Pyrrhus in possession
of the island against Demetrius--and in like manner Agathocles did not
cease to give the Tarentines uneasiness by his Italian policy. When
he died (465) and with him the power of the Syracusans in Italy went
to wreck, it was too late; Samnium, weary of the thirty-seven years'
struggle, had concluded peace in the previous year (464) with the
Roman consul Manius Curius Dentatus, and had in form renewed its
league with Rome. On this occasion, as in the peace of 450, no
disgraceful or destructive conditions were imposed on the brave people
by the Romans; no cessions even of territory seem to have taken place.
The political sagacity of Rome preferred to follow the path which it
had hitherto pursued, and to attach in the first place the Campanian
and Adriatic coast more and more securely to Rome before proceeding to
the direct conquest of the interior. Campania, indeed, had been long
in subjection; but the far-seeing policy of Rome found it needful, in
order to secure the Campanian coast, to establish two coast-fortresses
there, Minturnae and Sinuessa (459), the new burgesses of which were
admitted according to the settled rule in the case of maritime
colonies to the full citizenship of Rome. With still greater energy
the extension of the Roman rule was prosecuted in central Italy. As
the subjugation of the Aequi and Hernici was the immediate sequel of
the first Samnite war, so that of the Sabines followed on the end of
the second. The same general, who ultimately subdued the Samnites,
Manius Curius broke down in the same year (464) the brief and feeble
resistance of the Sabines and forced them to unconditional surrender.
A great portion of the subjugated territory was immediately taken into
possession of the victors and distributed to Roman burgesses, and
Roman subject-rights (-civitas sine suffragio-) were imposed on the
communities that were left--Cures, Reate, Amiternum, Nursia. Allied
towns with equal rights were not established here; on the contrary the
country came under the immediate rule of Rome, which thus extended as
far as the Apennines and the Umbrian mountains. Nor was it even now
restricted to the territory on Rome's side of the mountains; the last
war had shown but too clearly that the Roman rule over central Italy
was only secured, if it reached from sea to sea. The establishment
of the Romans beyond the Apennines begins with the laying out of the
strong fortress of Atria (Atri) in the year 465, on the northern slope
of the Abruzzi towards the Picenian plain, not immediately on the
coast and hence with Latin rights, but still near to the sea, and the
keystone of the mighty wedge separating northern and southern Italy.
Of a similar nature and of still greater importance was the founding
of Venusia (463), whither the unprecedented number of 20,000 colonists
was conducted. That city, founded at the boundary of Samnium, Apulia,
and Lucania, on the great road between Tarentum and Samnium, in an
uncommonly strong position, was destined as a curb to keep in check
the surrounding tribes, and above all to interrupt the communications
between the two most powerful enemies of Rome in southern Italy.
Beyond doubt at the same time the southern highway, which Appius
Claudius had carried as far as Capua, was prolonged thence to Venusia.
Thus, at the close of the Samnite wars, the Roman domain closely
compact--that is, consisting almost exclusively of communities with
Roman or Latin rights--extended on the north to the Ciminian Forest,
on the east to the Abruzzi and to the Adriatic, on the south as far as
Capua, while the two advanced posts, Luceria and Venusia, established
towards the east and south on the lines of communication of their
opponents, isolated them on every side. Rome was no longer merely the
first, but was already the ruling power in the peninsula, when towards
the end of the fifth century of the city those nations, which had been
raised to supremacy in their respective lands by the favour of the
gods and by their own capacity, began to come into contact in council
and on the battle-field; and, as at Olympia the preliminary victors
girt themselves for a second and more serious struggle, so on the
larger arena of the nations, Carthage, Macedonia, and Rome now
prepared for the final and decisive contest.
Notes for Book II Chapter VI
1. It may not be superfluous to mention that our knowledge Archidamus
and Alexander is derived from Greek annals, and that the synchronism
between these and the Roman is in reference to the present epoch only
approximately established. We must beware, therefore, of pursuing too
far into detail the unmistakable general connection between the events
in the west and those in the east of Italy.
2. These were not the inhabitants of Satricum near Antium (II. V.
League with The Hernici), but those of another Volscian town
constituted at that time as a Roman burgess-community without right
of voting, near Arpinum.
3. That a formal armistice for two years subsisted between the Romans
and Samnites in 436-437 is more than improbable.
4. The operations in the campaign of 537, and still more plainly the
formation of the highway from Arretium to Bononia in 567, show that
the road from Rome to Arretium had already been rendered serviceable
before that time. But it cannot at that period have been a Roman
military road, because, judging from its later appellation of the
"Cassian way," it cannot have been constructed as a -via consularis-
earlier than 583; for no Cassian appears in the lists of Roman consuls
and censors between Spurius Cassius, consul in 252, 261, and 268--who
of course is out of the question--and Gaius Cassius Longinus, consul
in 583.
CHAPTER VII
Struggle between Pyrrhus and Rome, and Union of Italy
Relations between the East and West
After Rome had acquired the undisputed mastery of the world, the
Greeks were wont to annoy their Roman masters by the assertion that
Rome was indebted for her greatness to the fever of which Alexander of
Macedonia died at Babylon on the 11th of June, 431. As it was not too
agreeable for them to reflect on the actual past, they were fond of
allowing their thoughts to dwell on what might have happened, had the
great king turned his arms--as was said to have been his intention at
the time of his death--towards the west and contested the Carthaginian
supremacy by sea with his fleet, and the Roman supremacy by land with
his phalanxes. It is not impossible that Alexander may have cherished
such thoughts; nor is it necessary to resort for an explanation of
their origin to the mere difficulty which an autocrat, who is fond
of war and is well provided with soldiers and ships, experiences in
setting limits to his warlike career. It was an enterprise worthy of
a Greek great king to protect the Siceliots against Carthage and the
Tarentines against Rome, and to put an end to piracy on either sea;
and the Italian embassies from the Bruttians, Lucanians, and
Etruscans,(1) that along with numerous others made their appearance at
Babylon, afforded him sufficient opportunities of becoming acquainted
with the circumstances of the peninsula and of entering into relations
with it. Carthage with its many connections in the east could not but
attract the attention of the mighty monarch, and it was probably one
of his designs to convert the nominal sovereignty of the Persian king
over the Tyrian colony into a real one: it was not for nothing that
a Phoenician spy was found in the retinue of Alexander. Whether,
however, these ideas were dreams or actual projects, the king died
without having interfered in the affairs of the west, and his ideas
were buried with him. For but a few brief years a Greek ruler had
held in his hand the whole intellectual vigour of the Hellenic race
combined with the whole material resources of the east. On his death
the work to which his life had been devoted--the establishment of
Hellenism in the east--was by no means undone; but his empire had
barely been united when it was again dismembered, and, amidst the
constant quarrels of the different states that were formed out of
its ruins, the object of world-wide interest which they were destined
to promote--the diffusion of Greek culture in the east--though not
abandoned, was prosecuted on a feeble and stunted scale. Under such
circumstances, neither the Greek nor the Asiatico-Egyptian states
could think of acquiring a footing in the west or of turning their
efforts against the Romans or the Carthaginians. The eastern and
western state-systems subsisted side by side for a time without
crossing, politically, each other's path; and Rome in particular
remained substantially aloof from the complications in the days
of Alexander's successors. The only relations established were of
a mercantile kind; as in the instance of the free state of Rhodes,
the leading representative of the policy of commercial neutrality in
Greece and in consequence the universal medium of intercourse in an
age of perpetual wars, which about 448 concluded a treaty with Rome
--a commercial convention of course, such as was natural between a
mercantile people and the masters of the Caerite and Campanian
coasts. Even in the supply of mercenaries from Hellas, the universal
recruiting field of those times, to Italy, and to Tarentum in
particular, political relations--such as subsisted, for instance,
between Tarentum and Sparta its mother-city--exercised but a very
subordinate influence. In general the raising of mercenaries was
simply a matter of traffic, and Sparta, although it regularly supplied
the Tarentines with captains for their Italian wars, was by that
course as little involved in hostilities with the Italians, as in the
North American war of independence the German states were involved in
hostilities with the Union, to whose opponents they sold the services
of their subjects.
The Historical Position of Pyrrhus
Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, was himself simply a military adventurer.
He was none the less a soldier of fortune that he traced back his
pedigree to Aeacus and Achilles, and that, had he been more peacefully
disposed, he might have lived and died as "king" of a small mountain
tribe under the supremacy of Macedonia or perhaps in isolated
independence. He has been compared to Alexander of Macedonia; and
certainly the idea of founding a Hellenic empire of the west--which
would have had as its core Epirus, Magna Graecia, and Sicily, would
have commanded both the Italian seas, and would have reduced Rome and
Carthage to the rank of barbarian peoples bordering on the Hellenistic
state-system, like the Celts and the Indians--was analogous in
greatness and boldness to the idea which led the Macedonian king over
the Hellespont. But it was not the mere difference of issue that
formed the distinction between the expedition to the east and that
to the west. Alexander with his Macedonian army, in which the
staff especially was excellent, could fully make head against the
great-king; but the king of Epirus, which stood by the side of
Macedonia somewhat as Hesse by the side of Prussia, could only raise
an army worthy of the name by means of mercenaries and of alliances
based on accidental political combinations. Alexander made his
appearance in the Persian empire as a conqueror; Pyrrhus appeared in
Italy as the general of a coalition of secondary states. Alexander
left his hereditary dominions completely secured by the unconditional
subjection of Greece, and by the strong army that remained behind
under Antipater; Pyrrhus had no security for the integrity of his
native dominions but the word of a doubtful neighbour. In the case
of both conquerors, if their plans should be crowned with success,
their native country would necessarily cease to be the centre of
their new empire; but it was far more practicable to transfer the
seat of the Macedonian military monarchy to Babylon than to found a
soldier-dynasty in Tarentum or Syracuse. The democracy of the Greek
republics--perpetual agony though it was--could not be at all coerced
into the stiff forms of a military state; Philip had good reason for
not incorporating the Greek republics with his empire. In the east no
national resistance was to be expected; ruling and subject races had
long lived there side by side, and a change of despot was a matter of
indifference or even of satisfaction to the mass of the population.
In the west the Romans, the Samnites, the Carthaginians, might be
vanquished; but no conqueror could have transformed the Italians
into Egyptian fellahs, or rendered the Roman farmers tributaries of
Hellenic barons. Whatever we take into view--whether their own power,
their allies, or the resources of their antagonists--in all points the
plan of the Macedonian appears as a feasible, that of the Epirot an
impracticable, enterprise; the former as the completion of a great
historical task, the latter as a remarkable blunder; the former as
the foundation of a new system of states and of a new phase of
civilization, the latter as a mere episode in history. The work of
Alexander outlived him, although its creator met an untimely death;
Pyrrhus saw with his own eyes the wreck of all his plans, ere death
called him away. Both were by nature daring and great, but Pyrrhus
was only the foremost general, Alexander was eminently the most gifted
statesman, of his time; and, if it is insight into what is and what is
not possible that distinguishes the hero from the adventurer, Pyrrhus
must be numbered among the latter class, and may as little be placed
on a parallel with his greater kinsman as the Constable of Bourbon may
be put in comparison with Louis the Eleventh.
And yet a wondrous charm attaches to the name of the Epirot--a
peculiar sympathy, evoked certainly in some degree by his chivalrous
and amiable character, but still more by the circumstance that he
was the first Greek that met the Romans in battle. With him began
those direct relations between Rome and Hellas, on which the whole
subsequent development of ancient, and an essential part of modern,
civilization are based. The struggle between phalanxes and cohorts,
between a mercenary army and a militia, between military monarchy and
senatorial government, between individual talent and national vigour
--this struggle between Rome and Hellenism was first fought out in
the battles between Pyrrhus and the Roman generals; and though the
defeated party often afterwards appealed anew to the arbitration of
arms, every succeeding day of battle simply confirmed the decision.
But while the Greeks were beaten in the battlefield as well as in
the senate-hall, their superiority was none the less decided on every
other field of rivalry than that of politics; and these very struggles
already betokened that the victory of Rome over the Hellenes would be
different from her victories over Gauls and Phoenicians, and that the
charm of Aphrodite only begins to work when the lance is broken and
the helmet and shield are laid aside.
Character and Earlier History of Pyrrhus
King Pyrrhus was the son of Aeacides, ruler of the Molossians (about
Janina), who, spared as a kinsman and faithful vassal by Alexander,
had been after his death drawn into the whirlpool of Macedonian
family-politics, and lost in it first his kingdom and then his life
(441). His son, then six years of age, was saved by Glaucias the
ruler of the Illyrian Taulantii, and in the course of the conflicts
for the possession of Macedonia he was, when still a boy, restored by
Demetrius Poliorcetes to his hereditary principality (447)--but only
to lose it again after a few years through the influence of the
opposite party (about 452), and to begin his military career as an
exiled prince in the train of the Macedonian generals. Soon his
personality asserted itself. He shared in the last campaigns of
Antigonus; and the old marshal of Alexander took delight in the born
soldier, who in the judgment of the grey-headed general only wanted
years to be already the first warrior of the age. The unfortunate
battle at Ipsus brought him as a hostage to Alexandria, to the court
of the founder of the Lagid dynasty, where by his daring and downright
character, and his soldierly spirit thoroughly despising everything
that was not military, he attracted the attention of the politic king
Ptolemy no less than he attracted the notice of the royal ladies by
his manly beauty, which was not impaired by his wild look and stately
tread. Just at this time the enterprising Demetrius was once more
establishing himself in a new kingdom, which on this occasion was
Macedonia; of course with the intention of using it as a lever to
revive the monarchy of Alexander. To keep down his ambitious designs,
it was important to give him employment at home; and Ptolemy, who knew
how to make admirable use of such fiery spirits as the Epirot youth in
the prosecution of his subtle policy, not only met the wishes of his
consort queen Berenice, but also promoted his own ends, by giving his
stepdaughter the princess Antigone in marriage to the young prince,
and lending his aid and powerful influence to support the return of
his beloved "son" to his native land (458). Restored to his paternal
kingdom, he soon carried all before him. The brave Epirots, the
Albanians of antiquity, clung with hereditary loyalty and fresh
enthusiasm to the high-spirited youth--the "eagle," as they called
him. In the confusion that arose regarding the succession to the
Macedonian throne after the death of Cassander (457), the Epirot
extended his dominions: step by step he gained the regions on the
Ambracian gulf with the important town of Ambracia, the island of
Corcyra,(2) and even a part of the Macedonian territory, and with
forces far inferior he made head against king Demetrius to the
admiration of the Macedonians themselves. Indeed, when Demetrius was
by his own folly hurled from the Macedonian throne, it was voluntarily
proffered by them to his chivalrous opponent, a kinsman of the
Alexandrid house (467). No one was in reality worthier than Pyrrhus
to wear the royal diadem of Philip and of Alexander. In an age of
deep depravity, in which princely rank and baseness began to be
synonymous, the personally unspotted and morally pure character of
Pyrrhus shone conspicuous. For the free farmers of the hereditary
Macedonian soil, who, although diminished and impoverished, were
far from sharing in that decay of morals and of valour which the
government of the Diadochi produced in Greece and Asia, Pyrrhus
appeared exactly formed to be the fitting king, --Pyrrhus, who,
like Alexander, in his household and in the circle of his friends
preserved a heart open to all human sympathies, and constantly
avoided the bearing of an Oriental sultan which was so odious to the
Macedonians; and who, like Alexander, was acknowledged to be the first
tactician of his time. But the singularly overstrained national
feeling of the Macedonians, which preferred the most paltry Macedonian
sovereign to the ablest foreigner, and the irrational insubordination
of the Macedonian troops towards every non-Macedonian leader, to which
Eumenes the Cardian, the greatest general of the school of Alexander,
had fallen a victim, put a speedy termination to the rule of the
prince of Epirus. Pyrrhus, who could not exercise sovereignty over
Macedonia with the consent of the Macedonians, and who was too
powerless and perhaps too high spirited to force himself on the nation
against its will, after reigning seven months left the country to its
native misgovernment, and went home to his faithful Epirots (467).
But the man who had worn the crown of Alexander, the brother-in-law
of Demetrius, the son-in-law of Ptolemy Lagides and of Agathocles
of Syracuse, the highly-trained tactician who wrote memoirs and
scientific dissertations on the military art, could not possibly end
his days in inspecting at a set time yearly the accounts of the royal
cattle steward, in receiving from his brave Epirots their customary
gifts of oxen and sheep, in thereupon, at the altar of Zeus, procuring
the renewal of their oath of allegiance and repeating his own
engagement to respect the laws, and--for the better confirmation of
the whole--in carousing with them all night long. If there was no
place for him on the throne of Macedonia, there was no abiding in the
land of his nativity at all; he was fitted for the first place, and
he could not be content with the second. His views therefore turned
abroad. The kings, who were quarrelling for the possession of
Macedonia, although agreeing in nothing else, were ready and glad to
concur in aiding the voluntary departure of their dangerous rival; and
that his faithful war-comrades would follow him where-ever he led, he
knew full well. Just at that time the circumstances of Italy were
such, that the project which had been meditated forty years before by
Pyrrhus's kinsman, his father's cousin, Alexander of Epirus, and quite
recently by his father-in-law Agathocles, once more seemed feasible;
and so Pyrrhus resolved to abandon his Macedonian schemes and to found
for himself and for the Hellenic nation a new empire in the west.
Rising of the Italians against Rome--
The Lucanians--
The Etruscans and Celts--
The Samnites--
The Senones Annihilated
The interval of repose, which the peace with Samnium in 464 had
procured for Italy, was of brief duration; the impulse which led to
the formation of a new league against Roman ascendency came on this
occasion from the Lucanians. This people, by taking part with Rome
during the Samnite wars, paralyzed the action of the Tarentines and
essentially contributed to the decisive issue; and in consideration of
their services, the Romans gave up to them the Greek cities in their
territory. Accordingly after the conclusion of peace they had, in
concert with the Bruttians, set themselves to subdue these cities in
succession. The Thurines, repeatedly assailed by Stenius Statilius
the general of the Lucanians and reduced to extremities, applied for
assistance against the Lucanians to the Roman senate--just as formerly
the Campanians had asked the aid of Rome against the Samnites--and
beyond doubt with a like sacrifice of their liberty and independence.
In consequence of the founding of the fortress Venusia, Rome could
dispense with the alliance of the Lucanians; so the Romans granted
the prayer of the Thurines, and enjoined their friends and allies to
desist from their designs on a city which had surrendered itself to
Rome. The Lucanians and Bruttians, thus cheated by their more
powerful allies of their share in the common spoil, entered into
negotiations with the opposition-party among the Samnites and
Tarentines to bring about a new Italian coalition; and when the Romans
sent an embassy to warn them, they detained the envoys in captivity
and began the war against Rome with a new attack on Thurii (about
469), while at the same time they invited not only the Samnites and
Tarentines, but the northern Italians also--the Etruscans, Umbrians,
and Gauls--to join them in the struggle for freedom. The Etruscan
league actually revolted, and hired numerous bands of Gauls; the Roman
army, which the praetor Lucius Caecilius was leading to the help of
the Arretines who had remained faithful, was annihilated under the
walls of Arretium by the Senonian mercenaries of the Etruscans: the
general himself fell with 13,000 of his men (470). The Senones were
reckoned allies of Rome; the Romans accordingly sent envoys to them to
complain of their furnishing warriors to serve against Rome, and to
require the surrender of their captives without ransom. But by the
command of their chieftain Britomaris, who had to take vengeance on
the Romans for the death of his father, the Senones slew the Roman
envoys and openly took the Etruscan side. All the north of Italy,
Etruscans, Umbrians, Gauls, were thus in arms against Rome; great
results might be achieved, if its southern provinces also should
seize the moment and declare, so far as they had not already done so,
against Rome. In fact the Samnites, ever ready to make a stand on
behalf of liberty, appear to have declared war against the Romans; but
weakened and hemmed in on all sides as they were, they could be of
little service to the league; and Tarentum manifested its wonted
delay. While her antagonists were negotiating alliances, settling
treaties as to subsidies, and collecting mercenaries, Rome was acting.
The Senones were first made to feel how dangerous it was to gain a
victory over the Romans. The consul Publius Cornelius Dolabella
advanced with a strong army into their territory; all that were not
put to the sword were driven forth from the land, and this tribe was
erased from the list of the Italian nations (471). In the case of a
people subsisting chiefly on its flocks and herds such an expulsion
en masse was quite practicable; and the Senones thus expelled from
Italy probably helped to make up the Gallic hosts which soon after
inundated the countries of the Danube, Macedonia, Greece, and Asia
Minor.
The Boii
The next neighbours and kinsmen of the Senones, the Boii, terrified
and exasperated by a catastrophe which had been accomplished with so
fearful a rapidity, united instantaneously with the Etruscans, who
still continued the war, and whose Senonian mercenaries now fought
against the Romans no longer as hirelings, but as desperate avengers
of their native land. A powerful Etrusco-Gallic army marched against
Rome to retaliate the annihilation of the Senonian tribe on the
enemy's capital, and to extirpate Rome from the face of the earth more
completely than had been formerly done by the chieftain of these same
Senones. But the combined army was decidedly defeated by the Romans
at its passage of the Tiber in the neighbourhood of the Vadimonian
lake (471). After they had once more in the following year risked a
general engagement near Populonia with no better success, the Boii
deserted their confederates and concluded a peace on their own account
with the Romans (472). Thus the Gauls, the most formidable member of
the league, were conquered in detail before the league was fully
formed, and by that means the hands of Rome were left free to act
against Lower Italy, where during the years 469-471 the contest had
not been carried on with any vigour. Hitherto the weak Roman army had
with difficulty maintained itself in Thurii against the Lucanians and
Bruttians; but now (472) the consul Gaius Fabricius Luscinus appeared
with a strong army in front of the town, relieved it, defeated the
Lucanians in a great engagement, and took their general Statilius
prisoner. The smaller non-Doric Greek towns, recognizing the Romans
as their deliverers, everywhere voluntarily joined them. Roman
garrisons were left behind in the most important places, in Locri,
Croton, Thurii, and especially in Rhegium, on which latter town the
Carthaginians seem also to have had designs. Everywhere Rome had most
decidedly the advantage. The annihilation of the Senones had given to
the Romans a considerable tract of the Adriatic coast. With a view,
doubtless, to the smouldering feud with Tarentum and the already
threatened invasion of the Epirots, they hastened to make themselves
sure of this coast as well as of the Adriatic sea. A burgess colony
was sent out (about 471) to the seaport of Sena (Sinigaglia), the
former capital of the Senonian territory; and at the same time a Roman
fleet sailed from the Tyrrhene sea into the eastern waters, manifestly
for the purpose of being stationed in the Adriatic and of protecting
the Roman possessions there.
Breach between Rome and Tarentum
The Tarentines since the treaty of 450 had lived at peace with Rome.
They had been spectators of the long struggle of the Samnites, and of
the rapid extirpation of the Senones; they had acquiesced without
remonstrance in the establishment of Venusia, Atria, and Sena, and in
the occupation of Thurii and of Rhegium. But when the Roman fleet, on
its voyage from the Tyrrhene to the Adriatic sea, now arrived in the
Tarentine waters and cast anchor in the harbour of the friendly city,
the long, cherished resentment at length overflowed. Old treaties,
which prohibited the war-vessels of Rome from sailing to the east of
the Lacinian promontory, were appealed to by popular orators in the
assembly of the citizens. A furious mob fell upon the Roman ships of
war, which, assailed suddenly in a piratical fashion, succumbed after
a sharp struggle; five ships were taken and their crews executed
or sold into slavery; the Roman admiral himself had fallen in the
engagement. Only the supreme folly and supreme unscrupulousness of
mob-rule can account for those disgraceful proceedings. The treaties
referred to belonged to a period long past and forgotten; it is clear
that they no longer had any meaning, at least subsequently to the
founding of Atria and Sena, and that the Romans entered the bay on
the faith of the existing alliance; indeed, it was very much their
interest--as the further course of things showed--to afford the
Tarentines no sort of pretext for declaring war. In declaring war
against Rome--if such was their wish--the statesmen of Tarentum were
only doing what they should have done long before; and if they
preferred to rest their declaration of war upon the formal pretext
of a breach of treaty rather than upon the real ground, no further
objection could be taken to that course, seeing that diplomacy has
always reckoned it beneath its dignity to speak the plain truth in
plain language. But to make an armed attack upon the fleet without
warning, instead of summoning the admiral to retrace his course, was
a foolish no less than a barbarous act--one of those horrible
barbarities of civilization, when moral principle suddenly forsakes
the helm and the merest coarseness emerges in its room, as if to warn
us against the childish belief that civilization is able to extirpate
brutality from human nature.
And, as if what they had done had not been enough, the Tarentines
after this heroic feat attacked Thurii, the Roman garrison of which
capitulated in consequence of the surprise (in the winter of 472-473);
and inflicted: severe chastisement on the Thurines--the same, whom
Tarentine policy had abandoned to the Lucanians and thereby forcibly
constrained into surrender to Rome--for their desertion from the
Hellenic party to the barbarians.
Attempts at Peace
The barbarians, however, acted with a moderation which, considering
their power and the provocation they had received, excites
astonishment. It was the interest of Rome to maintain as long as
possible the Tarentine neutrality, and the leading men in the senate
accordingly rejected the proposal, which a minority had with natural
resentment submitted, to declare war at once against the Tarentines.
In fact, the continuance of peace on the part of Rome was proffered on
the most moderate terms consistent with her honour--the release of the
captives, the restoration of Thurii, the surrender of the originators
of the attack on the fleet. A Roman embassy proceeded with these
proposals to Tarentum (473), while at the same time, to add weight to
their words, a Roman army under the consul Lucius Aemilius advanced
into Samnium. The Tarentines could, without forfeiting aught of
their independence, accept these terms; and considering the little
inclination for war in so wealthy a commercial city, the Romans had
reason to presume that an accommodation was still possible. But the
attempt to preserve peace failed, whether through the opposition
of those Tarentines who recognized the necessity of meeting the
aggressions of Rome, the sooner the better, by a resort to arms,
or merely through the unruliness of the city rabble, which with
characteristic Greek naughtiness subjected the person of the envoy
to an unworthy insult. The consul now advanced into the Tarentine
territory; but instead of immediately commencing hostilities, he
offered once more the same terms of peace; and, when this proved in
vain, he began to lay waste the fields and country houses, and he
defeated the civic militia. The principal persons captured, however,
were released without ransom; and the hope was not abandoned that the
pressure of war would give to the aristocratic party ascendency in the
city and so bring about peace. The reason of this reserve was, that
the Romans were unwilling to drive the city into the arms of the
Epirot king. His designs on Italy were no longer a secret. A
Tarentine embassy had already gone to Pyrrhus and returned without
having accomplished its object. The king had demanded more than it
had powers to grant. It was necessary that they should come to a
decision. That the civic militia knew only how to run away from the
Romans, had been made sufficiently clear. There remained only the
choice between a peace with Rome, which the Romans still were ready
to agree to on equitable terms, and a treaty with Pyrrhus on any
condition that the king might think proper; or, in other words, the
choice between submission to the supremacy of Rome, and subjection
to the --tyrannis-- of a Greek soldier.
Pyrrhus Summoned to Italy
The parties in the city were almost equally balanced. At length the
ascendency remained with the national party--a result, that was due
partly to the justifiable predilection which led them, if they must
yield to a master at all, to prefer a Greek to a barbarian, but partly
also to the dread of the demagogues that Rome, notwithstanding the
moderation now forced upon it by circumstances, would not neglect on a
fitting opportunity to exact vengeance for the outrages perpetrated
by the Tarentine rabble. The city, accordingly, came to terms with
Pyrrhus. He obtained the supreme command of the troops of the
Tarentines and of the other Italians in arms against Rome, along with
the right of keeping a garrison in Tarentum. The expenses of the war
were, of course, to be borne by the city. Pyrrhus, on the other hand,
promised to remain no longer in Italy than was necessary; probably
with the tacit reservation that his own judgment should fix the time
during which he would be needed there. Nevertheless, the prey had
almost slipped out of his hands. While the Tarentine envoys--the
chiefs, no doubt, of the war party--were absent in Epirus, the state
of feeling in the city, now hard pressed by the Romans, underwent
a change. The chief command was already entrusted to Agis, a man
favourable to Rome, when the return of the envoys with the concluded
treaty, accompanied by Cineas the confidential minister of Pyrrhus,
again brought the war party to the helm.
Landing of Pyrrhus
A firmer hand now grasped the reins, and put an end to the pitiful
vacillation. In the autumn of 473 Milo, the general of Pyrrhus,
landed with 3000 Epirots and occupied the citadel of the town.
He was followed in the beginning of the year 474 by the king himself,
who landed after a stormy passage in which many lives were lost.
He transported to Tarentum a respectable but miscellaneous army,
consisting partly of the household troops, Molossians, Thesprotians,
Chaonians, and Ambraciots; partly of the Macedonian infantry and the
Thessalian cavalry, which Ptolemy king of Macedonia had conformably to
stipulation handed over to him; partly of Aetolian, Acarnanian, and
Athamanian mercenaries. Altogether it numbered 20,000 phalangitae,
2000 archers, 500 slingers, 3000 cavalry, and 20 elephants, and thus
was not much smaller than the army with which fifty years before
Alexander had crossed the Hellespont
Pyrrhus and the Coalition
The affairs of the coalition were in no very favourable state when the
king arrived. The Roman consul indeed, as soon as he saw the soldiers
of Milo taking the field against him instead of the Tarentine militia,
had abandoned the attack on Tarentum and retreated to Apulia; but,
with the exception of the territory of Tarentum, the Romans virtually
ruled all Italy. The coalition had no army in the field anywhere in
Lower Italy; and in Upper Italy the Etruscans, who alone were still
in arms, had in the last campaign (473) met with nothing but defeat.
The allies had, before the king embarked, committed to him the chief
command of all their troops, and declared that they were able to place
in the field an army of 350,000 infantry and 20,000 cavalry. The
reality formed a sad contrast to these great promises. The army,
whose chief command had been committed to Pyrrhus, had still to be
created; and for the time being the main resources available for
forming it were those of Tarentum alone. The king gave orders for
the enlisting of an army of Italian mercenaries with Tarentine money,
and called out the able-bodied citizens to serve in the war. But the
Tarentines had not so understood the agreement. They had thought to
purchase victory, like any other commodity, with money; it was a sort
of breach of contract, that the king should compel them to fight for
it themselves. The more glad the citizens had been at first after
Milo's arrival to be quit of the burdensome service of mounting guard,
the more unwillingly they now rallied to the standards of the king:
it was necessary to threaten the negligent with the penalty of death.
This result now justified the peace party in the eyes of all, and
communications were entered into, or at any rate appeared to have been
entered into, even with Rome. Pyrrhus, prepared for such opposition,
immediately treated Tarentum as a conquered city; soldiers were
quartered in the houses, the assemblies of the people and the numerous
clubs (--sussitia--) were suspended, the theatre was shut, the
promenades were closed, and the gates were occupied with Epirot
guards. A number of the leading men were sent over the sea as
hostages; others escaped the like fate by flight to Rome. These
strict measures were necessary, for it was absolutely impossible in
any sense to rely upon the Tarentines. It was only now that the king,
in possession of that important city as a basis, could begin
operations in the field.
Preparations in Rome--
Commencement of the Conflict in Lower Italy
The Romans too were well aware of the conflict which awaited them. In
order first of all to secure the fidelity of their allies or, in other
words, of their subjects, the towns that could not be depended on were
garrisoned, and the leaders of the party of independence, where it
seemed needful, were arrested or executed: such was the case with a
number of the members of the senate of Praeneste. For the war itself
great exertions were made; a war contribution was levied; the full
contingent was called forth from all their subjects and allies; even
the proletarians who were properly exempt from obligation of service
were called to arms. A Roman army remained as a reserve in the
capital. A second advanced under the consul Tiberius Coruncanius
into Etruria, and dispersed the forces of Volci and Volsinii. The
main force was of course destined for Lower Italy; its departure was
hastened as much as possible, in order to reach Pyrrhus while still
in the territory of Tarentum, and to prevent him and his forces from
forming a junction with the Samnites and other south Italian levies
that were in arms against Rome. The Roman garrisons, that were placed
in the Greek towns of Lower Italy, were intended temporarily to check
the king's progress. But the mutiny of the troops stationed in
Rhegium--one of the legions levied from the Campanian subjects of
Rome under a Campanian captain Decius--deprived the Romans of that
important town. It was not, however, transferred to the hands of
Pyrrhus. While on the one hand the national hatred of the Campanians
against the Romans undoubtedly contributed to produce this military
insurrection, it was impossible on the other hand that Pyrrhus, who
had crossed the sea to shield and protect the Hellenes, could receive
as his allies troops who had put to death their Rhegine hosts in their
own houses. Thus they remained isolated, in close league with their
kinsmen and comrades in crime, the Mamertines, that is, the Campanian
mercenaries of Agathocles, who had by similar means gained possession
of Messana on the opposite side of the straits; and they pillaged and
laid waste for their own behoof the adjacent Greek towns, such as
Croton, where they put to death the Roman garrison, and Caulonia,
which they destroyed. On the other hand the Romans succeeded, by
means of a weak corps which advanced along the Lucanian frontier and
of the garrison of Venusia, in preventing the Lucanians and Samnites
from uniting with Pyrrhus; while the main force--four legions as it
would appear, and so, with a corresponding number of allied troops, at
least 50,000 strong--marched against Pyrrhus, under the consul Publius
Laevinus.
Battle near Heraclea
With a view to cover the Tarentine colony of Heraclea, the king had
taken up a position with his own and the Tarentine troops between that
city and Pandosia (3) (474). The Romans, covered by their cavalry,
forced the passage of the Siris, and opened the battle with a
vehement and successful cavalry charge; the king, who led his
cavalry in person, was thrown from his horse, and the Greek horsemen,
panic-struck by the disappearance of their leader, abandoned the field
to the squadrons of the enemy. Pyrrhus, however, put himself at the
head of his infantry, and began a fresh and more decisive engagement.
Seven times the legions and the phalanx met in shock of battle, and
still the conflict was undecided. Then Megacles, one of the best
officers of the king, fell, and, because on this hotly-contested day
he had worn the king's armour, the army for the second time believed
that the king had fallen; the ranks wavered; Laevinus already felt
sure of the victory and threw the whole of his cavalry on the flank of
the Greeks. But Pyrrhus, marching with uncovered head through the
ranks of the infantry, revived the sinking courage of his troops.
The elephants which had hitherto been kept in reserve were brought up
to meet the cavalry; the horses took fright at them; the soldiers, not
knowing how to encounter the huge beasts, turned and fled; the masses
of disordered horsemen and the pursuing elephants at length broke the
compact ranks of the Roman infantry, and the elephants in concert with
the excellent Thessalian cavalry wrought great slaughter among the
fugitives. Had not a brave Roman soldier, Gaius Minucius, the first
hastate of the fourth legion, wounded one of the elephants and thereby
thrown the pursuing troops into confusion, the Roman army would have
been extirpated; as it was, the remainder of the Roman troops
succeeded in retreating across the Siris. Their loss was great; 7000
Romans were found by the victors dead or wounded on the field of
battle, 2000 were brought in prisoners; the Romans themselves stated
their loss, including probably the wounded carried off the field, at
15,000 men. But Pyrrhus's army had suffered not much less: nearly
4000 of his best soldiers strewed the field of battle, and several of
his ablest captains had fallen. Considering that his loss fell
chiefly on the veteran soldiers who were far more difficult to be
replaced than the Roman militia, and that he owed his victory only to
the surprise produced by the attack of the elephants which could not
be often repeated, the king, skilful judge of tactics as he was, may
well at an after period have described this victory as resembling a
defeat; although he was not so foolish as to communicate that piece of
self-criticism to the public--as the Roman poets afterwards invented
the story--in the inscription of the votive offering presented by him
at Tarentum. Politically it mattered little in the first instance at
what sacrifices the victory was bought; the gain of the first battle
against the Romans was of inestimable value for Pyrrhus. His talents
as a general had been brilliantly displayed on this new field of
battle, and if anything could breathe unity and energy into the
languishing league of the Italians, the victory of Heraclea could not
fail to do so. But even the immediate results of the victory were
considerable and lasting. Lucania was lost to the Romans: Laevinus
collected the troops stationed there and marched to Apulia, The
Bruttians, Lucanians, and Samnites joined Pyrrhus unmolested. With
the exception of Rhegium, which pined under the oppression of the
Campanian mutineers, the whole of the Greek cities joined the king,
and Locri even voluntarily delivered up to him the Roman garrison; in
his case they were persuaded, and with reason, that they would not be
abandoned to the Italians. The Sabellians and Greeks thus passed over
to Pyrrhus; but the victory produced no further effect. The Latins
showed no inclination to get quit of the Roman rule, burdensome as it
might be, by the help of a foreign dynast. Venusia, although now
wholly surrounded by enemies, adhered with unshaken steadfastness to
Rome. Pyrrhus proposed to the prisoners taken on the Siris, whose
brave demeanour the chivalrous king requited by the most honourable
treatment, that they should enter his army in accordance with
the Greek fashion; but he learned that he was fighting not with
mercenaries, but with a nation. Not one, either Roman or Latin,
took service with him.
Attempts at Peace
Pyrrhus offered peace to the Romans. He was too sagacious a soldier
not to recognize the precariousness of his footing, and too skilled a
statesman not to profit opportunely by the moment which placed him in
the most favourable position for the conclusion of peace. He now
hoped that under the first impression made by the great battle on the
Romans he should be able to secure the freedom of the Greek towns in
Italy, and to call into existence between them and Rome a series of
states of the second and third order as dependent allies of the new
Greek power; for such was the tenor of his demands: the release of all
Greek towns--and therefore of the Campanian and Lucanian towns in
particular--from allegiance to Rome, and restitution of the territory
taken from the Samnites, Daunians, Lucanians, and Bruttians, or in
other words especially the surrender of Luceria and Venusia. If a
further struggle with Rome could hardly be avoided, it was not
desirable at any rate to begin it till the western Hellenes should
be united under one ruler, till Sicily should be acquired and perhaps
Africa be conquered.