Chapter 11
In This Chapter
● Rome’s struggle with the Latin League
● Defeating the Gauls
● Rome’s conquest of Italy
By about 450 BC, the Romans had gone a long way to setting up a political system that would define the next four centuries of their history (refer to Chapter 10 for the birth of the Roman Republic). But for the moment, Rome still didn’t matter very much to the rest of the world. In the fifth century BC, Athens was the most powerful force in the Mediterranean. So much so that centuries later in the Renaissance, learned men looked back eagerly at Athens’s experiments with democracy and what had happened in Greece.
Egypt was now in an advanced state of decline and Alexander the Great’s Macedonian Empire was still more than a century in the future. In northwestern Europe, places like Gaul and Britain, which would one day be part of the Roman Empire, were just beginning to trade with the classical world.
Most of these places knew nothing at all about Rome. By 270 BC, however, despite having to deal with their own internal political problems as well as attacks by neighbours, Rome was well on the way to controlling all of Italy. Armed with the resources of the whole of Italy, Rome was poised on the brink of seizing an international empire.
What made the difference is that Rome used every setback to regroup and return to the attack. Every victory was followed up by ruthless consolidation of the territory won. Crucially, the Romans also created settled conditions in Italy that looked attractive to many of the Italian peoples. That was one of the great secrets of Rome’s success - they made being ruled by Rome into a major advantage. The Etruscans and Gauls held out for a few more years, but Rome’s ruthless reprisals made them give up.
Winning Over the Latin League (493 BC)
This period is one of the most complicated phases in Roman history, and many of the key details are lost to us. What seems to have happened is that there were really three power groups involved: the Romans, the Etruscans, and the Latins. When Rome pushed out the Etruscan kings, she struck a major blow. But although Rome was turning into the biggest player around, the Latin cities weren’t in a rush to accept Rome’s power. Getting them to do that was a decisive moment.
Fights with the Etruscans
Tarquinius Superbus was the last of the kings of Rome who, because of his tyranny and cruelty, was rather unceremoniously ousted from power (refer to Chapter 10 for the gory details). Tarquinius, an Etruscan, was naturally infuriated by this and fought a battle against the Romans to reclaim his throne, but he was unsuccessful. Not ready to give up, he went to Lars Porsenna, another Etruscan leader (he was king of a city called Clusium), for help. Porsenna seems to have had no plans to put Tarquinius back on the throne and used the invitation to start exercising his own muscle.
According to legend, Porsenna marched on Rome but couldn’t cross the bridge to capture the city, thanks to a heroic defence by Horatius Cocles (which means one-eyed), who, with only two companions, held the crucial bridge long enough for the Romans to destroy it. Once the bridge was down, Horatius leaped into the river Tiber and swam home to be greeted by the cheering Romans.
Porsenna was very impressed by Horatius’s display of bravery, and also by Mucius Scaevola, who crept into the Etruscan camp planning to assassinate Porsenna and, when caught, put his right hand into a fire to show how brave he and other Romans were. It wasn’t just the men of Rome, either, who were tough. A woman hostage, Cloelia, held by the Etruscans, escaped back to Rome, but out of a sense of honour, the Romans sent her back. Porsenna let her go and abandoned the siege.
Thoroughly stirring stuff, designed to prove to the Romans just how honourable and brave their ancestors had been. Another version, probably more reliable, has Porsenna taking Rome, but not staying long. It seems that Rome’s resistance to Etruscan control impressed other local Latin cities, creating the foundations of the Latin League.
The creation of the Latin League
In about 506 BC, determined to throw off the Etruscans for good, the Latins organised themselves into the League. The League was made up of about 30 cities (not including Rome) in the Latium region, including Alba Longa, Bovillae, Lavinium, Praeneste, and Tibur. These cities shared the same gods and also realised the benefits of working together to defend themselves against external enemies, mainly the Etruscans. The Latin League seems to have grown out of an earlier League of Aricia, which Rome tended to control.
But Rome was left out of the new Latin League.
In response to the creation of the Latin League, the Etruscan Porsenna sent his son Arruns to teach the League a lesson, but the League defeated him at the Battle of Aricia, cutting the Etruscans off from southern Italy and permanently weakening them. It wasn’t till 359 BC that the Etruscans tried again.
Rome: At odds with the Latin League
With Arruns defeated, you’d have thought that the Latins and the Romans would have spotted they had common interests, but the problem was that there were huge tensions because the Latins resented the way Rome threw her weight about, claiming to speak for various Latin cities based on the old League of Aricia.
Although the Latins had been impressed by Roman resistance to the Etruscans, they were less impressed by the prospect of Rome’s growing power. The Latins were now organised in a League that left out the Romans, largely because the newly-independent Rome now claimed control of much of Latium. This claim even featured in a treaty she signed with Carthage about this time. Galvanised by their success against the Etruscans, the Latins decided to gear up for a trial of strength against the Romans.
Doing a deal with the Latins
Rome naturally wasn’t prepared to back down in the face of the Latin League’s resistance. Rome fought a battle against the Latins at Lake Regillus in 496 BC. Although the battle ended in a draw, it always went down in Roman tradition as a divinely inspired victory.
In reality, the Roman ‘victory’ had more to do with politics than divine intervention. The Latins were having trouble with mountain tribes coming down and invading their land and were forced to come to terms with the Romans to control this threat. Rome took advantage of the Latins’ vulnerability and negotiated a winning deal called the foedus Cassianum (a treaty named after the consul Spurius Cassius) in 493 BC. It worked like this:
● The Latin League and Rome provided equal shares of a common defensive army.
● Rome and the Latin League split any spoils of war.
Rome was now a match for the Latin League. The deal had very important implications later because the Latin cities were now being drawn into the Roman system. Rome planted colonies (coloniae) of Roman citizens and Latins in places where the presence of a loyal town with a defensive capability would be useful. Colonists stopped being Roman citizens and became citizens of the new city, which was made a member of the Latin League. The League, incidentally, lasted till 340 BC when Rome took the opportunity to undermine it (see the section ‘Meanwhile . . . the Latins strike back’ later for more detail).
Crushing the local opposition
The problems Rome and the Latins faced were the Etruscan city of Veii to the north, the Aequi people to the east, and the Volscians to the south. Tradition has it that a Roman traitor called Coriolanus led a Volscian invasion of Rome. Whether this tale is true or not, the Romans did make a treaty after the year 486 BC with a people called the Hernici who lay between the Aequi and the Volsci, effectively stopping the Aequi and the Volsci from joining forces against Rome. By the late fifth century, these two cities no longer posed a serious threat.
The Etruscan city of Veii, however, stood up to the Romans. In 426 BC, the Romans defeated the Veians, and they returned in 405 BC, determined to wipe out the city once and for all. A ten-year siege, which nearly crippled Rome thanks to Veii’s impregnable location, followed. Only an assault by a Roman general called Marcus Furius Camillus, who tunnelled under the walls, won the day in 396 BC.
The Romans exacted a brutal revenge on the Veians: Camillus told his troops they could kill the Veians at will and sell any survivors into slavery. The land the Romans seized was divided up amongst its poorer citizens. This sort of revenge set the pattern of Roman world-dominating brutality in later times.
Having the Gaul to Invade - 390 BC
By the early 390s BC, Gaulish Celts found their way south into northern Italy’s fertile Po Valley, called by the Romans Cisalpine Gaul. In 391, they threatened an Etruscan city called Clusium which appealed to Rome for help.
Rome warned off the invaders, but in 390 a Gaulish army reached the river Allia ten miles north of Rome.
Gaul is roughly equivalent to modern France. The Gaulish tribes were just one small group of peoples spread across central and north-western Europe and known to the Romans as Celts, a very loose term that doesn’t mean one common cultural group, though these days it’s often treated as if it does. The Celts knew about the Mediterranean world through trading contacts.
Getting sacked
In 390 BC (or 387 according to some sources), the Romans met the Gauls in battle and were totally defeated. The Romans didn’t have the equipment or the tactics to face the Gauls and their long swords. The Romans might be famous today for their highly disciplined and well-equipped professional regular army, but that belongs to a later period in Roman history. In the early days, the Roman army was drawn from the ranks of citizens on an as-needed basis, and they were often not up to the job.
Rome was saved because the Gauls failed to take advantage of the open road, which gave the Romans time to build a last stand on the Capitoline Hill. When the Gauls burst into Rome, they sacked the city and besieged the Capitoline for seven months. Eventually the Romans had to surrender and pay a ransom of gold. Amazingly at that point, the Gauls went back to northern Italy. But the damage was done.
This Gallic invasion turned out to be a curious portent of Rome’s future when, in AD 410, marauding tribes would once again come from northern Europe to sack and destroy Rome.
Changes at home
The invasion by the Gauls had all sorts of serious consequences. For a start, the Gauls had done a lot of damage to farmland. It took decades for Rome to repair what she had, rather than spending time on getting hold of new territory. Military service became more essential. The upshot was another economic decline.
The Tribune's image
Many years later, the Roman historian Plutarch described how the tribunes of the plebs (tribuni plebis) had to dress and behave like ordinary citizens, without any of the pomp and ceremony that surrounded officials like consuls. In fact, the more ordinary a tribune appeared, the more powerful he became. Approachability was essential, so his door was never locked, day or night, and he was treated almost as if he was sacred.
Another development was the growth in Roman citizenship (see Chapter 2 for more information about the benefits of citizenship). The number of Roman citizens grew for the following reasons:
● Latins who came to Rome and settled there could become Roman citizens with full voting rights. Foreigners, or people from other parts of Italy, who came to Rome could become ‘half-citizens’ - they were called cives sine suffragio, which means ‘citizens without the vote’. Roman citizenship became a very useful device later on, awarded to certain cities other than Rome.
● Another source of new citizens were the families of slaves. After a slave was freed he became a libertus (‘freedman’). He was not allowed to vote, but his sons could do so (see Chapter 2 for information about freedmen).
● There were also more plebs, thanks to the practice of creating colonies and also the municipia (cities founded by the Romans but whose inhabitants lacked the full rights of Roman citizens), and at the same time, fewer patricians. Many patricians had been killed in the fighting, and they continued to avoid marrying plebs even though that was now legal (refer to Chapter 10).
Despite the economic decline and because of the plebs’ growing numbers, the plebs were gaining the upper hand. The better-off plebeians were determined to take the opportunity to demand economic and political change.
(See Chapter 10 for more on the class war, the Conflict of the Orders, between the patricians and plebs.)
Economic muscle
Part of the way the plebs showed how their power was increasing came when they demanded economic measures to stave off ruin and also wanted the end of patrician privileges. The plebs forced in new laws to help debtors. The fact that they were able to do this showed the tensions between them and the patricians, and that the patricians weren’t able to stop them. This is what they achieved:
● Maximum interest rates were fixed.
● Enslavement of debtors was ended.
● The amount of public land anyone could hold was limited, making it possible for small parcels to be distributed amongst the poorer citizens.
Political reform
Plebeians also demanded, and got, political reform. The most important reform came in 367 BC when the plebs introduced the principle that one of the two annually elected consuls had to be a pleb. In 342 BC this came into force. Because the consulship was the senior magistracy, this meant that plebs could hold any of the magistracies. After plebs started holding the consulship, they effectively became a new plebeian aristocracy. By 300, the plebs won the right of appeal against a sentence of death. In 287 came the crowning victory: the right of the Concilium Plebis Tributum (the Council of Plebs arranged by Tribes; refer to Chapter 10) to pass laws which bound not just the plebs, but also the patricians.
As a result of these key reforms, the Roman magistracies evolved into a career structure with a clear hierarchy. A man began with military service and then served in each of the magistracies until he reached the consulship (see Chapter 3 for the career ladder in its mature form).
Because magistracies were short-term appointments, it was the Senate that provided the underlying long-term stability. The Senate couldn’t make laws, but because senators were ex-magistrates, its resolutions had so much prestige they were generally treated as laws. Certainly no serving magistrate would risk challenging the Senate.
Throughout all these changes, the Concilium Plebis Tributum was the real winner. It started out an illegal body, but by 300 BC, although it had none of the trappings or status of a magistracy, the Concilium Plebis Tributum had the power of veto over anything any magistrate did, or over any resolution of the Senate.
A new army and a new Latin League
After being defeated by the Gauls in 390 BC, the Romans were in a seriously weakened state. After having thrown their weight around for a century, all the hard-won advantage had been lost in a trice. But being Romans, they took it on the chin and set about repairing the damage:
They built walls so that no Gauls, or anyone else, would ever capture Rome again. The new walls were 8.9 kilometres (5.5 miles) long, 7.3 metres (24 feet) high and 3.67 metres (12 feet) thick. Some of these walls, falsely said to have been built by the Etruscan king of Rome, Servius
Tullius, still stand today and are known as the ‘Servian Walls’. When the Gauls invaded again in 360, the Romans made use of their new defences.
In fact, they hid behind their new walls until the Gauls went home again.
● They reorganised and re-equipped the army so that the Roman forces couldn’t be rushed by a high-speed barbarian attack. Instead of fighting in a solid wall of infantry, Roman soldiers were divided up into more flexible units. Troops were equipped with javelins as well as swords. The Roman army was no longer a defensive force. It was an army capable of conquest.
● They reorganised the Latin League. The Gauls’ invasion of 360 BC encouraged the Etruscans to try their hand at attacking Rome again, this time in 359. In response, Rome reorganised the Latin League so that Rome took total military control instead of sharing it. The Romans thoroughly defeated the Etruscans, and by 350 had made themselves safe against possible invasion by a neighbour.
Knocking out the Samnites
The Samnites were the tribes who lived along the Appenine Mountains in central and southern Italy. Because the Romans and Latins lived in the plains below the mountains to the west and started to make inroads on Samnite territory, and the Samnites were starting to encroach on the plains, it was plain that the Romans and Samnites would come to blows.
The Samnites lived in widely-dispersed villages and had little control over any individual community’s involvement in raiding or warfare. So the Samnites earned themselves a bad reputation for causing trouble. Even so, in 354 BC, the Romans accepted an offer of a treaty from the Samnites; probably both sides fearing another Gaulish invasion. But this treaty didn’t solve all the problems between the Samnites and the Romans.
The First Samnite War (343-341 BC)
In 343 BC, the Samnites started hassling the city of Capua in Campania, about 350 kilometres (220 miles) south-east of Rome. Capua appealed to Rome for help. Rome saw its chance to take control over the region of Campania and promptly threw out the Samnite treaty, even though there had never been any tradition of the Romans helping the Capuans.
The First Samnite War was short and inconclusive. To begin with, the Romans drove the Samnites out of the area around Capua. But in 342, Roman soldiers mutinied because they resented being away from home on long campaigns. That could have wrecked Rome’s prestige once again, but fortunately the Samnites had to retreat to defend themselves against a Greek colony called Tarentum in the far south of Italy. The result was that in 341 BC, the Romans and Samnites renewed their treaty.
Meanwhile . . . the Latins strike back
The First Samnite War wasn’t a military disaster for the Romans, but it was very nearly a political one. The Latins spotted how the army mutiny had nearly scuppered Rome’s ability to hold back the Samnites and decided to try their chances at gaining back parity.
The bold bid fails
So in 340, the Latins demanded a restoration of equal rights between themselves and Rome. Naturally the Romans refused. So the Latins made an alliance with the Campanians and Rome’s old enemy, the Volsci (refer to the section ‘Crushing the local opposition’), which looked like a good way of overpowering Rome. Except that the Romans were smarter and now used their alliance with the Samnites to defeat the Latins and Campanians.
Dismantling the Latin League
After defeating the Latins and the Campanians, the Romans offered excellent peace terms to the Campanians, who promptly left their alliance with the Latins. Now in a position of unassailable strength, the Romans simply dismantled the Latin League and forced each city to come to terms individually with Rome in a settlement of 338 BC. The Romans introduced:
● Municipal status: Some of the existing Latin cities were made into municipiae, divided into two types: those whose citizens became Roman citizens with full voting rights; and those where the citizens had no voting rights but still had to supply Rome with soldiers.
● New Roman colonies: Rome also set up colonies (coloniae) of Roman citizens to guard strategic locations. The city of Antium (modern Anzio), for instance, had its fleet destroyed by the Romans. It was allowed to remain in existence, but a colony of Roman citizens was planted in its territory to guard the port. Another colony called Cales was established in 334 BC to defend Capua.
The technique the Romans used to thwart the Latin League’s coup is called divide and rule. The Romans had used it before, and they’d use it again in the centuries to come, playing off one tribe against another. Similarly, coloniae and municipia were brilliant devices that Rome would use in the future (see Chapter 2 for more on municipia). These devices left cities with their own identities and some powers of self-government, but at the same time gave the inhabitants status within the Roman system.
The Second Samnite War (326-304 BC)
Having well and truly sorted out the Latin League to its advantage (see the preceding section), Rome decided to ignore the Samnites in her settlement of 338 BC. The last straw for the Samnites was when the Romans, always looking for a way to enhance their power and influence, made a treaty with the powerful Greek trading and manufacturing city of Tarentum in southern Italy in 334 BC, while the Tarentines were at war with the Samnites.
By 327, the Samnites had made peace with Tarentum and now started trying to expand their power westwards. They placed a force of theirs into the Greek port and colony of Neapolis (Naples). The nearby Capuans objected and asked Rome for help.
Naturally, the Romans responded and sent a force down to Naples. The Roman army besieged the Samnite garrison but offered them such excellent terms the Samnites surrendered. But the Samnites hadn’t given up their scheme to conquer the western coastal plains. The next few years were a stalemate. The Romans didn’t dare fight in the Samnites’ mountain territory, and the Samnites were held back by Roman garrisons.
The war’s first phase ended in 321 BC. Impatient for a decisive action, the Romans sent an army from Capua to attack Samnium. The Samnites trapped the Roman army in the mountains at the Caudine Forks, near Capua, and forced them into a humiliating surrender. The Samnites thought they’d won, but the Romans used the peace to regroup. As usual after a defeat, the Roman army was enlarged and tactics improved.
In 316 BC, the Romans restarted the war, but things quickly went wrong. Another Roman force was defeated, and the Capuans promptly went over to the Samnites. But in 314, the Romans won back control, forced the Capuans back on their side, and set up new colonies to control the territory.
The Samnites could see they had little chance of winning under these circumstances, and in 304 BC they made peace with Rome. The Romans were keen to end the fighting and made no attempt to conquer Samnite territory. They were secure in the knowledge that, if war broke out again, they now had the upper hand with so much more territory under their control and with colonies dotted about to keep it safe.
Try, try, and try again: The Third Samnite War (298-290 BC)
Despite Rome’s advantages, the Third Samnite War was a close-run thing for them. This time round the Samnites were joined by the Etruscans and the Gauls. The Samnites, under their leader Egnatius Gellus, soundly defeated the Romans at Camerinum (modern Cameria) in 295 BC. The Romans nearly lost again that year at the Battle of Sentinum (Sassoferrato), but Roman bravery (and the withdrawal of the Etruscans) turned the potential disaster into a victory. The Samnite leader Egnatius was killed, causing the Samnites to collapse. Afterwards, the Samnites’ allies made peace with Rome. That’s when Rome moved in to snatch a victory. By 291, the Samnites were cut off and isolated. In 290, they gave up and accepted the status of allies of Rome, and as such were forced to contribute to Rome’s army. As was so often the case, Rome appeared magnanimous but had worked everything to her advantage by not seeking revenge.
Now for the Rest of Italy
The Romans had control of much of central Italy, but there was still Magna Graecia (‘Great Greece’) to deal with. Magna Graecia was the name given to southern Italy - where the Greek colonies were in control. The most powerful Greek colony was Tarentum (modern Taranto), with a wealthy economy based on wool and pottery, which enabled the Tarentines to field a 15,000- strong army, maintain a navy, and afford mercenaries to fend off their enemies, such as the Samnites, as well as their local rivals and enemies the Lucanians, a tribe who lived in part of southern Italy called Lucania.
In 334 BC, the Tarentines hired Alexander the Great’s brother-in-law, Alexander of Epirus, to help them to fight off raids by the Samnites and Lucanians. Alexander negotiated a treaty with the Romans then, in alliance with the Samnites. Under the treaty, the Romans promised not to help the Samnites fight the Tarentines. The problem for the Tarentines was that the Roman alliance might have helped them hold off the Samnites, but the Second and Third Samnite Wars saw Roman armies move into the region. That worried the Tarentines, who had also realised Alexander was more interested in conquering his own empire. So they abandoned him to be defeated and killed by the Lucanians and then started deciding what to do about the Romans.
Pyrrhus arrives to show who's who
The Tarentines became more and more worried by Rome’s ambitions. Rome’s power was such that she was constantly being asked for help by places that felt under threat. The Greek city of Thurii was being attacked by the Lucanians, so in 282 BC, the Thurians asked the Romans for military support. As Thurii was only a few miles down the coast from Tarentum on the Gulf of Otranto, the Tarentines were worried and annoyed at the breach of Alexander’s treaty (in which Rome had agreed not to send any of her ships into the Gulf). So the Tarentines attacked and defeated the Roman forces.
Because the Romans were still fighting off the Etruscans and Gauls, Romans asked for compensation instead of fighting back. But the Tarentines threw that out. They were feeling confident because by then they had hired King Pyrrhus of Epirus, considered to be the number one Greek soldier of his day, to make sure they could push the Romans back and encourage Rome’s allies to defect.
Pyrrhus couldn’t resist the opportunity to throw his weight about, so when the Tarentines called for his help, he turned up with a force of 25,000 men - a very bad omen for the Romans.
Pyrrhus won the first round in 280 BC. The Romans brought him to battle at Heraclea, not far from Tarentum on the Gulf of Otranto in southern Italy. The Roman cavalry was routed by the arrival of Pyrrhus’s army of elephants. The Samnites and Lucanians promptly joined Pyrrhus, spotting their chance for revenge on the Romans. In 279, Pyrrhus beat the Romans again, this time at Asculum, but it was a hard-won victory.
Pyrrhus decided that defeating the Romans permanently would take far too long and cost too many lives. He offered peace on the condition that the Romans abandoned southern Italy, which the Roman Senate refused to do. In 278 Rome’s forces were bolstered by money and ships from the Carthaginians of North Africa who were worried Pyrrhus might attack them.
Pyrrhus’s victory over the Romans in 279 BC cost him so dearly he said ‘another victory like that, and we’re done for’. Nowadays the term Pyrrhic victory means any success won at so much cost it wasn’t worth it.
In fact, Pyrrhus did indeed go off to attack the Carthaginians. While he was away doing that, the Romans attacked his Samnite and Lucanian allies (these battles are sometimes called the Fourth Samnite War). In 276 BC, the Samnites begged Pyrrhus to come back and help them. He did, but was roundly defeated by the Romans near Beneventum, just south-east of Capua and dangerously close to Rome.
Pyrrhus fled home and was killed two years later when a pot thrown out of a window accidentally fell on his head, which just goes to show how history can be turned around by remarkably trivial events.
By Jove, I think We've done it
With Pyrrhus gone, the way was open for the Romans. They captured Tarentum in 272 BC, which meant they’d not only seized a hugely wealthy city, but they also had control of the Italian peninsula.
The Greek cities of the south were drawn into the Roman net and became allies (socii). Unlike the Latin cities, the Greek cities provided ships rather than troops. Latin colonies were planted here and there to secure strategic locations, like Paestum. The Samnite federation was permanently broken up into units that were individually allied to Rome.
More importantly, the other players on the Mediterranean saw that there was a new kid on the block. At the same time as the Carthaginians were renewing their treaty with the Romans, far to the east, the Macedonian Pharaoh of Egypt, Ptolemy II (285-246 BC), was making a pact of friendship with Rome.