Between 367 and 290 BC, Carthage fights Syracuse, and Rome fights everyone within marching distance
WHILE THE GREEKS had been making useless stabs at unity—the Peloponnesian League, the Hellenic League, the Delian League, and the travesty of the Corinthian League—the cities in the old territory of Latium were also coalescing into an alliance: the “Latin League.” The Romans called this league the Nomen Latium, and while they had been reasonably friendly with the Latin League cities for over a century (the first peace treaty between Rome and the League was probably signed around 490 BC), Rome never joined. The city was not inclined to become one among equals.
In the thirty-odd years since the Gauls had burned Rome, the Romans had rebuilt their walls, fought off various attacks from their neighbors, sent troops east to the Anio river to battle with more Gauls (the Roman soldiers approached the campaign in “great terror,” Livy says, but “many thousands of barbarians were killed in battle,”)1 and suffered through yet another patrician-plebian standoff. This one ended in 367 with a patrician concession: the consulship would be formally opened to plebians, and the first plebian consul was installed that same year.
The Senate announced that this compromise needed to be celebrated with an extra festival day, and Livy himself calls it a “noteworthy” year, in which, “after their long dispute, the two orders were reconciled and in agreement at last.”2 “In agreement” is a bit strong, since patricians and plebians continued to aggravate each other, but the new arrangement does seem to have acted as grease in the squeaky relationship between the two classes. In the next decades there was enough peace within Rome’s walls for the city to turn renewed attention to empire-building.
In 358, Rome convinced the Latin League to renew the old peace treaty.192 As before, the two sides were obliged to defend each other in attack. But from now on, all booty from joint campaigns would be divided equally between the two sides; Rome would get as much out of any victory as all the cities of the League combined.3 Rome was no longer simply another city on the peninsula; it was a power as great as the League itself.
In 348, the Romans updated another treaty, this one with Carthage. Roman ships still weren’t supposed to sail farther west than Fair Promontory, and the Carthaginians still promised not to build any forts in the territory of the Latins. But a new condition turned the peace treaty into something slightly different: “If the Carthaginians capture any city in Latium which is not subject to Rome,” the treaty specified, “they shall keep the goods and the men, but deliver up the city.”4 The Carthaginians were now partners in conquest; Rome was laying plans to control the countryside, even as its leaders swore friendship with the Latin League.
In the next fifty years, Rome’s aggression would lead it into four wars and a revolt, and a fifth war would swirl just off its shores.
JUST ACROSS the Liri river lay an alliance of tribes known, collectively, as the Samnites. They came from the southern Apennines, and lived in a mesh of farms and villages below Rome and east of the coastal area of Campania.5 Farms aside, they were known as an alarming set of fighters, “strong both in resources and in arms,” as Livy puts it.6
Despite an earlier agreement that the Liri would serve as a boundary between them, Rome went to war against the Samnites in 343. Roman accounts put the best possible light on this; the Romans, Livy says, were simply responding to a desperate appeal for help, because the Samnites had “unjustly attacked” the people who lived in the region of Campania, on the southwestern coast. But the city’s ambitions come out in Livy’s version of events: “‘We have reached the point…when Campania will have to be absorbed by her friends or by her enemies,” his Campanian ambassadors plead. “You, Romans, must occupy it yourselves rather than let [the Samnites] take it, a good deed on your part, an evil one of theirs…. Romans, the shadow of your help is enough to protect us, and whatever we have…we shall consider all yours.”7
No matter how pressed the Campanians were, it is unlikely that any of Rome’s neighbors were begging for absorption; this “First Samnite War” was the next move in Rome’s imperial game. The gambit was not particularly successful. By 341, the First Samnite War was stalemated, and the two sides agreed to a treaty.
69.1 Roman Enemies and Allies
The second war, the Latin War, broke out right on the heels of the first. The cities of the Latin League, watching Rome’s activities in the south, had finally decided that no treaty was going to halt Roman expansionism. Complicated political maneuverings resulted in the Latin cities attacking Rome, with the Samnites joining in the Roman side in order to keep Latin power from spreading farther to the south.
This war, Livy writes, was particularly difficult for the Roman army because the Latins marching towards them “were the same as themselves in language, customs, type of arms, and above all in military institutions.” This concerned the consuls who were in command of the Roman army. In fear that the Roman soldiers would lose track of who were the allies and who the enemy, they “issued the order that no one was to leave his position to fight the enemy.”8
The Latin soldiers and the Roman-Samnite troops met near Capua, in a savage battle. The Romans “broke up their enemy’s formation with such slaughter that they left scarcely a quarter of their opponents alive,” while the “entire army” of the Romans had been “cut to pieces…. before the standards and behind them was equally a bloodbath.”9 Even after so much bloodshed, the two armies regrouped and clashed again. This time the Romans were victorious.
After the Latin surrender, the Romans claimed an empire’s worth of Italian land: not only Latium, but the north of Campania and southern Etruria as well.10 The various peoples pulled within the Roman sphere were treated according to their loyalties. The Latins, Livy says, “were deprived of their rights to intermarry and trade with each other and to hold councils amongst themselves,” which cut the ties between the League cities. The people of Campania who had fought on Rome’s side “were granted citizenship without the vote,” as were the residents of several other allied cities.11 This was an odd category of privilege, the civitas sine suffragio; the new semicitizens were protected by the Laws of the Twelve Tables, but given no voice in Rome’s decisions.
Rome also began to plant new colonies with increasing speed, spreading its boundaries by building as well as conquest.12 The fledgling empire, however, was anything but stable; Livy uses the phrase “bad peace” to describe its relations with its newly conquered members and as-yet-unconquered neighbors.
In 326, even the bad peace ended, and the Samnites once again rose up in arms. Once again the aggression was on the Roman side; the Romans had crossed over that old boundary, the Liri river, to build a colony in Samnite land.13 The “Second Samnite War” dragged on for over twenty years, in a series of dreary repetitive clashes between the two armies.
As Romans and Samnites battled, another fight was brewing offshore. With the Romans busy in Samnite territory, an ambitious Sicilian named Agathocles had seized the chance to do a bit of empire-building of his own. Agathocles was a Syracusan ex-potter who had married well and hired himself an army. In 317, he took Syracuse by force and made himself its tyrant, using the good old Merodach-baladan/Napoleon/Sargon II/Cyrus justification: “He declared that he was restoring to the people their full autonomy,” writes Diodorus Siculus,14 a claim which rang a little hollow when he then went on to conquer most of the rest of Sicily.
This involved shoving Carthaginians off the island, and Carthage did not ignore the challenge to its power in the Mediterranean. By 310, the Carthaginian navy had blockaded Syracuse. In response, Agathocles sent a Syracusan force to attack Carthage itself.15
The Carthaginians were so alarmed by this unexpected assault that the city fell into a panic. The priests of Carthage, who still followed a version of the old Canaanite religion brought over from Tyre centuries earlier, sacrificed as many as five hundred children to the Carthaginian deities in order to assure victory.16 “They believed they had neglected the honors of the gods that had been established by their fathers,” Diodorus tells us, and were anxious to make amends for the shortcomings that had brought Agathocles’s invasion on them: “There was in their city a bronze image of Cronus [the Greek name for Baal, a Phoenician male god], extending its hands, palms up and sloping toward the ground, so that each of the children when placed thereon rolled down and fell into a sort of gaping pit filled with fire.”19317
This horrific ritual didn’t bring victory. Although Carthage did not fall, neither did Syracuse, and by 306 the two sides had to sign a treaty. Agathocles stayed on the throne of Syracuse, but Carthage kept control of the west part of the island.18
Just afterwards, in 304, the Romans finally made peace with the Samnites (again). Meanwhile, they had embarked on yet another empire-building project. Cyrus had laid out his Royal Road to link his original heartland with conquered territory, and the Romans, following suit, had begun to construct an official road to link the city with their own outlying lands. The consul Appius Claudius Caecus began the project in 312, and the road, which eventually ran along the coast all the way down to Capua in Campania, took his name: the Appian Way.
The peace with the Samnites lasted all of six years. In 298, just after the consular elections, Livy writes that a rumor began to spread through Rome: “the Etruscans and Samnites were enlisting huge armies…. The enemies of Rome were preparing for war with all their own might and that of their allies.”19 The anti-Roman coalition assembling across the Liri included not only Samnites and the remaning Etruscans, but also a contingent of Gauls down from the north and Umbrians, a federation of tribes from the Apennines northeast of Etruria. These disparate peoples were willing to band together to fight against Rome: a clear reflection of the growing sense of crisis over Rome’s ongoing expansion.
The Roman campaign against this federation, the “Third Samnite War,” began with three years of hard fighting that finally culminated at a huge battle in Sentinum, just across the Apennines in Umbria itself; the farthest away, in all likelihood, that the Roman army had ever campaigned, and the first time that many had ever crossed the mountains. “Great is the fame of that day on which the battle was fought in Sentinum,” Livy says.
A day was fixed for the battle, the Samnites and Gauls were chosen to engage in it, and during the actual fighting the Etruscans and Umbrians were to attack the Roman camp. These plans were upset by three deserters…who came over secretly by night to [the commanding consul] Fabius and told him of the enemy’s intentions.20
The Romans, who had been seriously outnumbered by the four-way alliance, sent a detachment to go raid Etruscan and Umbrian land, at which point the Etruscan and Umbrian contingents went home to defend their families and farms. So when the battle began, the Romans were lined up against the Gauls and Samnites. They were “equally matched,” Livy says; the Roman cavalry scattered in terror when the Gauls charged down in chariots, which many Romans had never seen before, and one of the consuls was killed; the Gauls, in turn, fell in such numbers that the heaps of bodies took days to remove. At last, with thousands dead on both sides, the Gaulish and Samnite line was breached, their camp invaded, and their retreat blocked.
Now the Romans had control of the countryside, but “there was still no peace” in the countryside, as Livy concludes. The worst of the fighting ended in 295, at Sentinum, but raids, battles, revolts, and rebellions continued for another five years. Another treaty in 290 brought an end to the Third Samnite War. But even afterwards, Roman soldiers marched out every year to fight in the north and center of the Italian peninsula; the Roman fist, closing over the countryside, was armored.
