Just as in the distant mythical past Romulus granted citizenship to the Sabines, so now the Republic offered the Latins civic rights. In this way, it enlarged the pool of potential military recruits to the legions. A human reservoir was created that gave Rome a unique staying power in times of war. Defeat could follow defeat, if the Fates willed it, and still there would be new conscripts to replace lost armies.
In place of a federation in which each member was connected to one another, Rome set up bilateral relations with individual communities, which were forbidden to undertake treaties among themselves. They were also compelled to surrender substantial tracts of land. The Latins and some others were divided into three different constitutional and legal classes. First of all, some defeated statelets were incorporated as municipia, or free towns, in the Republic and their inhabitants given full Roman citizenship. One example was Antium (today’s Anzio), the onetime Volscian capital, but not before it was obliged to surrender its fleet after a sea battle. Some ships’ prows or “beaks” (rostra, in Latin) were displayed in the Roman Forum on the main speakers’ platform, thereafter known as the Rostra.
The second category consisted of communities that kept their independence—at least in theory, for they forfeited the power to conduct their own foreign policy. These “allies” had rights of connubium and commercium—that is, their citizens were allowed to marry Romans and enter into contracts with them, according to Roman law. When asked, they had to supply troops.
Finally, for those more distant communities in the new Roman “commonwealth” that lay beyond the borders of Latium, such as the Campanian cities of Capua and Cumae, partial enfranchisement was granted: civitas sine suffragio, or citizenship without the vote. This included the rights of connubium and commercium, and liability to the obligations of full Roman citizenship, especially military service. They were entitled to move to Rome, if they so wished, and in that case could acquire full Roman citizenship. The duty to fight alongside the legions sounds more punitive than it actually was, for, as when Rome won its wars, these compulsory comrades would have their share of the spoils of victory.
Another innovative device helped the Romans not only to secure their conquests, but to unify them with their conquerors. This was the foundation of coloniae, “colonies,” by which small groups of Latin, Campanian, and Roman settlers established their own townships on annexed enemy territory; sometimes these were new foundations, but on occasion they were attached to existing settlements. They were useful watch posts that could detect early signs of trouble in the surrounding population; they also alleviated economic pressures at Rome by providing farms and jobs for the landless poor. Coastal coloniae relieved the Republic of the need to build a fleet to defend home waters. Above all, this colonial system, as it developed over time, contributed powerfully to the cultural Romanization of Italy.
It took some time for the settlement to bed down. Many Latin communities resented the loss of their age-old freedoms, and Rome took care to leave them free to run their own local affairs. Their city walls were not leveled but left standing—clever and persuasive symbolism.
It has been estimated that the extent of territory now occupied by Roman citizens of every kind, the ager Romanus, was 3,400 square miles, and that of the larger Roman commonwealth as a whole 5,300 square miles. According to a modern calculation, the total population of the ager Romanus was 347,300 free persons and that of the commonwealth 484,000 free persons.
Rome had become a substantial state, by Greco-Roman standards; it was a token of its growing power that a second treaty of friendship with Carthage was negotiated in 348. Its conquests meant, among other things, that the problem of poverty and indebtedness that beset the young Republic was alleviated, although it never vanished. As we have seen, an indigent Roman would be paid a salary if he fought in the army. He might be allocated a smallholding in freshly conquered territory and, if he was willing to leave the city, he could join a colonia and make a new life for himself.
IF EVER A landscape made its people, it was Samnium.
This is a mountainous, landlocked plateau in central Italy. Here the Apennines are not so much mountains as a tangled maze of massifs, spurs, and reentrants. The region is roughly rectangular and is cut through by steep valleys often ending in culs-de-sac, down which rivers or seasonal torrents cascade. Here and there gray limestone mountains push up toward the sky, and are covered in snow for most of the year. Much of the usable land is suitable only for grazing, but there are many fertile pockets where earth can be tilled and crops grown. Rich, narrow fields lie alongside streams. Winters were wild and austere, summers arid and baking hot. Earthquakes racked and eroded the hills.
As we have seen, the Samnites were among the infiltration southward, propelled by Sacred Springs, of Oscan speakers in previous centuries. By 500, if not earlier, they had settled in their new rugged homeland. They coveted the flat, fertile earth of Campania and its cultured cities. Some of them descended from their aeries, conquered the inhabitants, and took over the territory. They soon learned to enjoy an easier way of life and forgot their highland ancestry.
The Samnites were fierce and hardy mountaineers. Excavated skeletons show that they were ethnically homogeneous and dolichocephalic (that is, their heads were unusually long from front to back), from which we can infer that, isolated among their peaks, they did not intermarry with their Latin neighbors. Pre-urban, they lived in scattered villages and built many small stone forts on remote hilltops (about ninety of which have been located by archaeologists); most were not for living in but were a temporary refuge in times of trouble.
There were four Samnite tribal groups, each forming a community called a touto. The Hirpini lived in the south, the Caudini in the west, the Carracini in the northeast, and the largest, the Pentri, occupied the center and east of Samnium. The total number of inhabitants was surprisingly high for a remote rural area and is estimated at about 450,000 persons.
In general, the Samnites were poor and relatively unsophisticated, with no coinage and little trade. There seems to have been an aristocracy with large landholdings, but their politics were democratic and simply organized. One or more villages made up a pagus, an economically self-sufficient and independent-minded canton. It elected a governing official called a meddis. A group of pagi made up the tribal touto, whose annually elected chief magistrate was a meddis tovtiks. There appears to have been a council that magistrates were obliged to consult. Despite their decentralized political system, Samnites possessed a powerful sense of cultural identity.
The economy—landlocked as it was, and lacking in raw materials for industries—was centered on animal husbandry and peasant farming. The Samnites raised horses, poultry, pigs, and goats. Above all, they were sheep breeders. In the summer, their animals grazed on high ground; for the winter months, they were taken down to the plains along wide drovers’ trails, which doubled as the main means of human communication in Samnium. Among the region’s specialties were fine wines and sweet Sabellian cabbages.