Theodor Mommsen - The History of Rome. Book II

15.Livy certainly states (iv. 47) that Labici became a colony in 336. But - apart from the fact that Diodorus (xiii. 6) says nothing of it - Labici cannot have been a burgess-colony, for the town did not lie on the coast and besides it appears subsequently as still in possession of autonomy; nor can it have been a Latin one, for there is not, nor can there be from the nature of these foundations, a single other example of a Latin colony established in the original Latium. Here as elsewhere it is most probable - especially as two jugera are named as the portion of land allotted - that a public assignation to the burgesses has been confounded with a colonial assignation ( I. XIII. System of Joint Cultivation).

16.II. IV. South Etruria Roman.

17.II. V. League with the Hernici.

18. This restriction of the ancient full reciprocity of Latin rights first occurs in the renewal of the treaty in 416 (Liv. viii. 14); but as the system of isolation, of which it was an essential part, first began in reference to the Latin colonies settled after 370, and was only generalized in 416, it is proper to mention this alteration here.

19.The name itself is very ancient; in fact it is the most ancient indigenous name for the inhabitants of the present Calabria (Antiochus, Fr. 5. Mull.). The well-known derivation is doubtless an invention.

20.Perhaps no section of the Roman annals has been more disfigured than the narrative of the first Samnite-Latin war, as it stands or stood in Livy, Dionysius, and Appian. It runs somewhat to the following effect. After both consuls had marched into Campania in 411, first the consul Marcus Valerius Corvus gained a severe and bloody victory over the Samnites at Mount Gaurus; then his colleague Aulus Cornelius Cossus gained another, after he had been rescued from annihilation in a narrow pass by the self-devotion of a division led by the military tribune Publius Decius. The third and decisive battle was fought by both consuls at the entrance of the Caudine Pass near Suessula; the Samnites were completely vanquished - forty thousand of their shields were picked up on the field of battle - and they were compelled to make a peace, in which the Romans retained Capua, which had given itself over to their possession, while they left Teanum to the Samnites (413). Congratulations came from all sides, even from Carthage. The Latins, who had refused their contingent and seemed to be arming against Rome, turned their arms not against Rome but against the Paeligni, while the Romans were occupied first with a military conspiracy of the garrison left behind in Campania (412), then with the capture of Privernum (413) and the war against the Antiates. But now a sudden and singular change occurred in the position of parties. The Latins, who had demanded in vain Roman citizenship and a share in the consulate, rose against Rome in conjunction with the Sidicines, who had vainly offered to submit to the Romans and knew not how to save themselves from the Samnites, and with the Campanians, who were already tired of the Roman rule. Only the Laurentes in Latium and the equites of Campania adhered to the Romans, who on their part found support among the Paeligni and Samnites. The Latin army fell upon Samnium; the Romano-Samnite army, after it had marched to the Fucine lake and from thence, avoiding Latium, into Campania, fought the decisive battle against the combined Latins and Campanians at Vesuvius; the consul Titus Manlius Imperiosus, after he had himself restored the wavering discipline of the army by the execution of his own son who had slain a foe in opposition to orders from headquarters, and after his colleague Publius Decius Mus had appeased the gods by sacrificing his life, at length gained the victory by calling up the last reserves. But the war was only terminated by a second battle, in which the consul Manlius engaged the Latins and Campanians near Trifanum; Latium and Capua submitted, and were mulcted in a portion of their territory.

The judicious and candid reader will not fail to observe that this report swarms with all sorts of impossibilities. Such are the statement of the Antiates waging war after the surrender of 377 (Liv. vi. 33); the independent campaign of the Latins against the Paeligni, in distinct contradiction to the stipulations of the treaties between Rome and Latium; the unprecedented march of the Roman army through the Marsian and Samnite territory to Capua, while all Latium was in arms against Rome; to say nothing of the equally confused and sentimental account of the military insurrection of 412, and the story of its forced leader, the lame Titus Quinctius, the Roman Gotz von Berlichingen. Still more suspicious perhaps, are the repetitions. Such is the story of the military tribune Publius Decius modelled on the courageous deed of Marcus Calpurnius Flamma, or whatever he was called, in the first Punic war; such is the recurrence of the conquest of Privernum by Gaius Plautius in the year 425, which second conquest alone is registered in the triumphal Fasti; such is the self-immolation of Publius Decius, repeated, as is well known, in the case of his son in 459. Throughout this section the whole representation betrays a different period and a different hand from the other more credible accounts of the annals. The narrative is full of detailed pictures of battles; of inwoven anecdotes, such as that of the praetor of Setia, who breaks his neck on the steps of the senate-house because he had been audacious enough to solicit the consulship, and the various anecdotes concocted out of the surname of Titus Manlius; and of prolix and in part suspicious archaeological digressions. In this class we include the history of the legion - of which the notice, most probably apocryphal, in Liv. i. 52, regarding the maniples of Romans and Latins intermingled formed by the second Tarquin, is evidently a second fragment, the erroneous view given of the treaty between Capua and Rome (see my Rom. Munzwesen, p. 334, n. 122); the formularies of self-devotion, the Campanian denarius , the Laurentine alliance, and the bina jugera in the assignation (p. 450, note). Under such circumstances it appears a fact of great weight that Diodorus, who follows other and often older accounts, knows absolutely nothing of any of these events except the last battle at Trifanum; a battle in fact that ill accords with the rest of the narrative, which, in accordance with the rules of poetical justice, ought to have concluded with the death of Decius.

21. II. V. Isolation of the Later Latin Cities as Respected Private Rights.

22.II. V. Crises within the Romano-Latin League.

23.II. IV. South Etruria Roman.

1.It may not be superfluous to mention that our knowledge Archidamus and Alexander is derived from Greek annals, and that the synchronism between these and the Roman is in reference to the present epoch only approximately established. We must beware, therefore, of pursuing too far into detail the unmistakable general connection between the events in the west and those in the east of Italy.

2. These were not the inhabitants of Satricum near Antium (II. V. League with The Hernici), but those of another Volscian town constituted at that time as a Roman burgess-community without right of voting, near Arpinum.

3. That a formal armistice for two years subsisted between the Romans and Samnites in 436-437 is more than improbable.

4. The operations in the campaign of 537, and still more plainly the formation of the highway from Arretium to Bononia in 567, show that the road from Rome to Arretium had already been rendered serviceable before that time. But it cannot at that period have been a Roman military road, because, judging from its later appellation of the "Cassian way," it cannot have been constructed as a via consularis earlier than 583; for no Cassian appears in the lists of Roman consuls and censors between Spurius Cassius, consul in 252, 261, and 268 - who of course is out of the question - and Gaius Cassius Longinus, consul in 583.