It did not take long for his speculations to make the Bay of Naples synonymous with wealth and chic. Nor was the boom confined solely to the coast. Inland too, in ancient cities such as Capua, where the scent of perfume hung thick in the streets, or Nola, a favoured ally of Rome for more than two centuries, marks of peace and softness were all around. Beyond their walls, fields of apple-trees and vines, olive groves and wild flowers stretched away, back towards Vesuvius and the sea. This was Campania, the jewel of Italy, playground of the rich, fertile, prosperous and luxuriant.
But not everywhere was booming. Beyond Nola, valleys wound from the lowlands into a very different world. In Samnium all was mountainous and austere. Just as the jagged contours of the landscape provided a brutal contrast with the plain below, so too did the character of the people who had to scratch a living from the stony, scrub-clad soil. There were no oysters in Samnium, no heated swimming pools, only lumbering peasants with comical, rustic accents. They practised witchcraft, wore ugly rings of iron round their necks, and – scandalously – permitted barbers to shave their pubic hair in public. The Romans, needless to say, regarded them with scorn.
All the same, they could never quite forget that these savages had been the last Italian people to contest the mastery of the peninsula with them. Barely ten miles from Nola, at a mountain pass known as the Caudine Forks, the Samnites had inflicted one of the most humiliating defeats in Roman history. In 321 BC an entire army had been trapped in the defile and forced to surrender. Rather than slaughter their captives, the Samnites had elected to strip them to their tunics and drive them beneath a yoke formed of spears, while the victors, in their splendid armour, had stood and watched in triumph. By humiliating them in this manner, however, the Samnites had betrayed a fatal misunderstanding of their enemies. Peace was intolerable to the Romans unless they dictated it themselves. Despite the terms agreed and sworn to, they had soon found a way of breaking the treaty, and returned to the attack. Samnium had been duly conquered. Colonies were built on remote hilltops, roads driven over the valleys, the very ruggedness of the landscape tamed. To anyone lolling beside one of Orata’s swimming pools, the age when the Samnites would sally forth from the mountains to devastate Campania must have seemed very ancient history indeed.
But then suddenly, late in 91 BC, the unbelievable happened. Long-held grudges, never entirely extinguished, flared back into flames. Warfare returned to the Samnite hills. The mountain-men armed themselves as though the long years of occupation had melted away. Pouring from their fastnesses, they did as their ancestors had always done, and swept into the plains. The Romans, unmindful of the storm about to break, had stationed only the barest military presence in Campania and were caught perilously short. All along the Bay of Naples, lately the scene of such indolence and peace, cities fell to the rebels like ripe fruit from a tree: Surrentum, Stabiae and Herculaneum. But the biggest prize of all – by virtue of its strategic situation – lay further inland: Nola. After only the briefest of sieges the city was betrayed to the Samnites. The garrison was invited to join the rebel forces, but when its commander and the senior officers contemptuously refused, they were starved to death. The city itself was strengthened and provisioned. Soon enough Nola had become a mighty stronghold of the rebels’ cause.
That cause was not confined to the Samnites alone. The treachery that had delivered Nola into the hands of the rebels was far from an isolated incident: the town of Pompeii, for instance, only a few miles from Naples along the slope of Vesuvius, had been party to the rebellion from the very start. Elsewhere in Italy, tribes and cities whose previous campaigns against Rome belonged to an age of barely remembered legend had also taken up arms. The particular focus of the rebellion, however, lay along the line of the Apennines, in territory mountainous and backward like Samnium, where the peasants had long been brutalised by poverty. It was this which gave their eruption into the urbanised lowlands such a savage quality. When the rebels captured Asculum, the first city to fall to them, they slaughtered every Roman they could find. The wives of those who refused to join them had then been tortured and scalped.
The record of such atrocities might suggest nothing more than a vengeful and primitive barbarism. Yet the hatreds of the peasantry would have counted for nothing without the oligarchies who ruled the various Italian states having their own reasons for unleashing them. It had always been Roman practice to flatter and bribe the ruling classes of their allies – indeed, it was the success of this policy that had done more than anything else to ensure the Italians’ loyalty in the past. Increasingly, however, those with the crucial power to influence their communities – the wealthy, the landed, the literate – had begun to find themselves alienated from Rome. Their resentments were many. The burden of military service in Rome’s wars fell disproportionately on their shoulders. They held an inferior status in Roman law. Perhaps most unsettlingly of all, however, their eyes had been opened to a world of opportunity and power undreamed of by their ancestors. The Italians had not only helped Rome to conquer her empire, but had contributed enthusiastically to exploiting it. Wherever Roman arms had led, there Italian businessmen had been sure to follow. In the provinces the Italian allies were guaranteed privileges virtually indistinguishable from those of full Roman citizens, and the wretched provincials certainly found it hard to tell the two classes apart, loathing them equally as ‘Romaioi’. Far from mollifying the Italians, however, the experience of living abroad as a master race seems only to have encouraged them in their determination to share in a similar status back in their native land. In an era when Roman power had grown so universal, it is hardly surprising that the limited privileges of self-determination that Rome had always granted Italian politicians should have come to seem very small beer. What was the right to determine a local boundary dispute or two compared to the mastery of the world?
Just as the teeming wharves of Puteoli or the sophistication of the nearby pleasure-villas spoke of a shrinking world, then so too, in its own way, did the Italians’ revolt. The mass of their armies may have been fighting in defence of vaguely felt local loyalties, but their leaders certainly had no wish to return to the parochialisms of life before Rome. Far from trying to free their communities from the grip of a centralising super-state, they could think of no recourse other than to invent a new one of their own. At the start of the war, the rebel leaders had chosen Corfinium, in the heart of Italy, to be their new capital, ‘a city which all the Italians could share in as a replacement for Rome’.12 Just so that no one would miss the symbolism of this measure, both Corfinium and the new state itself had then been given the name of ‘Italia’. Coins had been duly issued and an embryonic government set up. Not until the nineteenth century, and Garibaldi, would there be another such attempt to form an independent Italian state.
But if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then the establishment of Italia suggests that for the vast majority of the Italian leaders, at least, rebellion against Rome had been a gesture less of defiance than of frustrated admiration. From the constitution to the coinage, everything was copied from the Romans. All along, the rickety new state had never been anything more than second best to the Italians’ real ambition – enrolment as citizens of Rome. Even among the common soldiers, to whom Roman citizenship would have brought few benefits, there are signs that resentment of the Republic was sometimes balanced by a mood of fellow feeling. Early in the war, following the defeat of Rome’s main army in central Italy, the survivors found themselves engaged in a desperate holding action, against men at least as well trained and armed as themselves. All through the summer of 90 BC they fought a painstaking trench warfare, gradually rolling back the rebels’ front until, as harvest-time drew near, and with it the end of the campaigning season, they prepared to engage the enemy one final time. But as the two armies lined up opposite each other soldiers on both sides began to recognise friends, calling out to one another, and then laying down their arms. ‘The threatening atmosphere was dissolved and instead became like that of a festival.’ As their troops fraternised the Roman commander and his opposite number also met, to discuss ‘peace and the Italian longing for citizenship’.13