From Caserta and what is to be seen from Caserta, our next journey lies
by the line of railway which runs right across Italy, connecting the
two great lines of the east and west of the peninsula. It leads us from
the Campanian plain, with at least its sheltering wall of mountains,
with Tifata to guard the great city that once was from the ruder land
beyond, to the great plain of Apulia from which every feature of a
mountain-land has passed away. But, in so crossing from one side of
Italy to the other, we pass through a striking and an historic region.
We are in the land of the mightiest Italian rivals of Rome, the land
of those with whom Rome had to fight, before Pyrrhos and Hannibal came,
and ages after Pyrrhos and Hannibal were gone.
Our course leads us into the heart of the Samnite land, a land which
may well call up endless musings on the hard fate of those "hearts of
steel" who bore up so long against Rome, in the days when Rome was
really at her greatest. And the memories of the same land in after
days are not wholly alien to those of earlier times. Our course brings
us, at not a few points, across the memories, if not of nations, yet
of men, who had to bear up against the power of Rome, when the power
of Rome had taken a far other form than that of the senate and the
armies against which the Samnite had to strive. For the old Samnite
land holds its place in later story, as the land of princes who felt
what the spiritual Rome could do when the powers of the spiritual
Rome were at their highest. We pass through regions which were the
scene of no small part of the history of the Norman and Swabian lords
of Sicily and Southern Italy. We are deep in the land of the counts,
dukes, kings, and emperors of the house of Hauteville and the house
of Hohenstaufen; and we are often called on to stop and track out
their deeds. At not a few points do we light on some building, some
inscription, which brings up the memory of Frederick, the Wonder of
the World, and of Manfred, whose field of overthrow we shall presently
pass by. In both periods the history of these lands has a character
altogether different from that of Northern and Central Italy. In the
later period this needs no proof: we are dealing with the history of
a kingdom, not with the history of a system of separate cities. But
something of the same difference extends to the earlier period also. If
we wish to know more of Volscians and Hernicans, yet more keenly do we
wish to know more of Samnites. The part which they played is greater,
at all events in scale, and their dealings with Rome belong to a stage
of Roman history when we feel that we have a kind of right to know
more than we could hope to know in the earlier time. But while we know
something of the character of the Samnite people as a whole, while we
know something--though much less than in some other Italian lands--of
the geography of the Samnite country, we have no clear notion of the
political position or the political action of any particular Samnite
city or canton, such as we ever and anon do get of particular cities
of Etruria and Latium. And again, it is seldom that we can call up
any distinct personal conception of any Samnite leader as a living and
breathing man. This is indeed a grievance which affects Samnites along
with the other Italian enemies of Rome. The personal conceptions which
we do get of Etruscans and Latins largely belong to legendary times. Of
historical Volscians we know very few. And we have already complained
on Hernican ground that we cannot picture to ourselves the personal
likeness of any single Hernican of independent Hernican days.
Still, on this particular journey we have small right to complain;
for we pass by the spot which calls up the memories of the most
memorable Samnites of whom we have any personal knowledge. They are
men of one name, most likely therefore of one house, and men of whom
we emphatically wish to know more than we do know. Leaving Caserta
behind, glancing at the Campanian plain and the Campanian mountains,
marking Naples only by the smoke of the distant city, we pass along
through what, in our simplicity, we take to be the vale of Vulturnus,
till we light on a more classical friend, armed with a more classical
map, who explains that the stream which we are tracing is in strictness
not Vulturnus himself, but only his tributary Calor. Anyhow we go
along its course into the heart of the Samnite land, and we pass by
one spot--a spot which we ought to have treated better than merely to
pass it by, a spot round which the greatest memories of Samnite history
gather, and where they strangely interweave themselves with wholly
different memories of the history of our own land. We reach Telesia,
the home of the Pontii, and we remember that Telesia was also for a
moment the home of Anselm. Our guide-book provokingly fails us; but
the large building on the hill-side must surely be the monastery where
he sojourned. There are Roman antiquities in the place; for Samnite
antiquities we do not look. But did Samnites build no walls, or do the
mighty bulwarks of Cori and Segni mark an earlier state of things than
the Sabellian occupation of Southern Italy? Anyhow, we are here at the
place which has attached itself as a surname to the two most memorable
men in the scanty personal history of Samnium. Here, on his own
ground, we remember that Gaius Pontius who spared Rome's army at the
Caudine Forks, and who lived to be led, twenty-seven years later, as a
spectacle in a Roman triumph, to end his days, one might almost say as
a martyr, by the axe of the headsman in a Roman dungeon. So we used to
read the tale in our youth; so moralized the historians of our youth
over the special baseness which handed over such a man to such an end.
Or are we to adopt the new reading of the tale which at least saves
Quintus Fabius Maximus from that special stain of blood-guiltiness
which cleaves to the canonized memory of Divus Julius? It may be
well if we can believe that one of the worthiest heroes of the old
commonwealth, if he could not forestall the magnanimity of Pompeius and
Aurelian, at least did not sink to the special and petty spite of the
murderer of Vercingetorix. We are now taught that the Gaius Pontius
who appears twenty-seven years after the first mention of that name,
is most likely not the same man as the merciful victor of the Caudine
Forks. If this be so, then Quintus Fabius, in consigning his Pontius
to the axe, merely conformed to the cruel custom of his nation, without
the further aggravation of slaying in cold blood one who had dealt with
Rome so nobly. And after all some might hint that the oldest Pontius
of all was the wisest. It may be that the sage old father of Gaius
knew human nature best, when he bade his son either to massacre the
whole Roman army or else to let them go free without terms. It may be
that the son chose a more dangerous path than either, when he took to
diplomacy and middle courses.
But if the earlier Pontius of Telesia should prove--though the guess
is a simple guess--to be in truth two Pontii, perhaps a father and a
son, no doubt seems to have fixed itself on the identity of the last
Pontius at the Colline gate of Rome. The rising again of Samnite life
at the last moment of all, when the war with the allies seemed to have
lost itself in the deeper whirlpool of the war of Marius and Sulla,
is really the most striking thing in the whole history, such as we
have it, of the Samnite people. We are taken by surprise when, in
days when Rome already seems the fully established head, not only of
Italy, but of all the Mediterranean world, her power, her very being,
is threatened by the leader of a nation which seemed to have been dead
and buried for some centuries. But, just like the Volumnian tomb in
one way, so the Samnite resurrection in another way is a witness to
the real life which the other states of Italy kept on under a form
of Roman dominion which made them externally dependent, which threw
its influence into the scale of oligarchy in their external affairs,
which ever and anon subjected them to some irregular demand, but which
left the general course of their lives to be whatever they themselves
chose it to be. In the days of Marius and Sulla, Etruscans and Samnites
were still Etruscans and Samnites; they had not become Romans, nor had
they merged their being in any common name of Italians. The Social War
itself was the first attempt at forming a general Italian nationality.
But the last campaign of the last Pontius shows how deep, in Samnite
hearts at least, was the earlier feeling, the feeling which knew
no greater whole than the federal union of Etruria or Samnium. It
shows too how specially deep was the feeling of hatred for the single
city which had brought down so many cities and leagues to become its
helpless dependents. Against Pontius at the Colline gate Rome fought
for life, as she had never fought since the old days when she had to
guard herself against enemies who lived within sight of her capitol.
Foreign invaders, Pyrrhos, Hannibal himself, did not come with the
same fixed purpose of rooting up the wood which sheltered the wolves of
Italy. We can hardly doubt that it is the hand of Sulla which from that
day to this has hindered the south of Italy from being like the north.
But the blow which crushed the Samnite people as the other nations of
Italy were not crushed, was vengeance taken for a moment when it once
more became a question whether Rome should rule over Italy, whether
Rome should exist at all.
At Telesia we look out, and muse on what might have been, if one
Pontius had done otherwise than he did by the forks of Caudium, if
another Pontius had fared otherwise than he fared at the gates of
Rome herself. At our next halting-place we are called on, not to muse
on what might have been, but on what was. At Beneventum we tread the
battle-ground of Pyrrhos and Manfred, the ground of two of the greatest
victories of the Rome of the earlier and the Rome of the later day.
There we need not strive to call up the dim figures of men, like the
older and the later Pontius, known by one action of their lives. The
Epeirot and the Swabian stand out as clearly discerned figures in the
history of their several ages. And the places where we next halt will
show us the place of overthrow for both, the place of death and utter
ruin for one.