Never had Rome been so encompassed by enemies as when she emerged from the monarchy as a weak city-state ruling only 350 square miles—equivalent to a space nineteen by nineteen miles. While Lars Porsena advanced upon her, many of the neighboring communities that had been subjected by her kings resumed their liberty and formed a Latin League to withstand Rome. Italy was a medley of independent tribes or cities, each with its own government and dialect: in the north the Ligures, Gauls, Umbrians, Etruscans, and Sabines; to the south the Latins, Volscians, Samnites, Lucanians, Bruttians; along the western and southern coasts Greek colonists in Cumae, Naples, Pompeii, Paestum, Locri, Rhegium, Crotona, Metapontum, Tarentum. Rome was at the center of them all, strategically placed for expansion, but perilously open to attack from all sides at once. It was her salvation that her enemies seldom united against her. In 505, while she was at war with the Sabines, a powerful Sabine clan—the Claudian gens—came over to Rome and was granted citizenship on favorable terms. In 449 the Sabines were defeated; by 290 all their territory was annexed to Rome, and by 250 they had received the full Roman franchise.
In 496 the Tarquins persuaded some of the towns of Latium—Tusculum, Ardea, Lanuvium, Aricia, Tibur, and others—to join in a war against Rome. Faced with this apparently overwhelming combination, the Romans appointed their first dictator, Aulus Postumius; at Lake Regillus they won a saving victory, helped, they assure us, by the gods Castor and Pollux, who left Olympus to fight in their ranks. Three years later Rome signed a treaty with the Latin League in which all parties pledged that “between the Romans and the cities of the Latins there shall be peace as long as heaven and earth shall last. . . . Both shall share equally in all booty taken in a common war.”27 Rome became a member of the League, then its leader, then its master. In 493 she fought the Volscians; it was in this conflict that Caius Marcius won the name of Coriolanus by capturing Corioli, the Volscian capital. The historians add, probably with a touch of romance, that Coriolanus became a hard reactionary, was banished on the insistence of the plebs (491), fled to the Volscians, reorganized them, and led them in a siege of Rome. The starving Romans, we are told, sent embassy after embassy to dissuade him, to no avail, until his mother and wife went out to him and, failing in their pleas, threatened to block his advance with their bodies. Thereupon he withdrew his army, and was killed by the Volscians; or, says another story, he lived among them to a bitter ripe old age.28 In 405 Veii and Rome entered upon a duel to the death for control of the Tiber. Rome besieged the city for nine years without success, and the emboldened towns of Etruria joined in the war. Attacked on every side, and their very existence challenged, the Romans appointed a dictator, Camillus, who raised a new army, captured Veii, and divided its lands among the citizens of Rome. In 351, after sundry further wars, southern Etruria was annexed to Rome under the almost modern name of Tuscia.
Meanwhile, in 390, a new and greater peril appeared, and that long duel had begun, between Rome and Gaul, which ended only with Caesar. While Etruria and Rome were fighting fourteen wars, Celtic tribes from Gaul and Germany had filtered down through the Alps and settled in Italy as far south as the Po. Ancient historians called the invaders Keltai or Celtae, Galatae or Galli, indifferently. Nothing is known of their origin; we may only describe them as that branch of the Indo-European stock which peopled western Germany, Gaul, central Spain, Belgium, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, and formed the pre-Roman languages there. Polybius pictures them as “tall and handsome,” relishing war, and fighting naked except for golden amulets and chains.29 When the Celts of southern Gaul tasted Italian wine, they were so pleased with it that they decided to visit the land that produced such transporting fruit; probably they were moved more by the quest for fresh acres and new pasturage. Entering, they lived for a time in abnormal peace, tilling and herding, and taking over the Etruscan culture which they found in the towns. About 400 B.C. they invaded and plundered Etruria; the Etruscans resisted weakly, having sent most of their forces to defend Veii against Rome. In 391, 30,000 Gauls reached Clusium; a year later they met the Romans at the river Allia, routed them, and entered Rome unhindered. They sacked and burned large sections of the city, and for seven months besieged the remnants of the Roman army on the Capitol—the crest of the Capitoline hill. Finally the Romans yielded, and paid the Gauls a thousand pounds of gold to depart.V They left, but returned in 367, 358, and 350; repeatedly repulsed, they at last contented themselves with northern Italy, which now became Cisalpine Gaul.
The surviving Romans found their city so devastated that many of them wished to abandon the site and make Veii their capital. Camillus dissuaded them, and the government provided financial aid for rebuilding homes. This rapid reconstruction in the face of many enemies was a part cause of Rome’s design-lessness and the venturesome crookedness of her narrow streets. The subject peoples, seeing her so near destruction, revolted again and again, and half a century of intermittent war was required to cure their lust for freedom. The Latins, Aequi, Hernici, and Volscians attacked in turn or together; if the Volscians had succeeded they would have shut off Rome from southern Italy and the sea, and perhaps have put an end to her history. In 340 the cities of the Latin League were defeated; two years later Rome dissolved the League and annexed nearly all Latium.VI
Meanwhile the victories of Rome over the Volscians had brought her face to face with the powerful Samnite tribes. These held a large cross section of Italy from Naples to the Adriatic, with such rich cities as Nola, Beneventum, Cumae, and Capua. They had absorbed most of the Etruscan and Greek settlements of the west coast, and enough of Hellenism to produce a distinctive Campanian art; probably they were more civilized than the Romans. With them Rome fought three long and bloody wars for the control of Italy. At the Caudine Forks (321) the Romans suffered one of their greatest defeats, and their beaten army passed “under the yoke”—an arch of hostile spears—in token of submission. The consuls at the front signed an abject peace, which the Senate refused to ratify. The Samnites won the Etruscans and Gauls as allies, and for a time Rome faced nearly all Italy in arms. But the legions gained a decisive victory at Sentinum (295), and Rome added Campania and Umbria to her domain. Twelve years later she drove the Gauls back beyond the Po, and again reduced Etruria to a subject state.
Between the Gallic north and the Greek south, Rome was now master of Italy. Insatiate and insecure, she offered the cities of Magna Graecia a choice between alliance under Roman hegemony and war. Preferring Rome to further absorption by the “barbarian” (i.e., Italian) tribes who were multiplying around and within them, Thurii, Locri, and Crotona consented; probably they, too, like the towns of Latium, were troubled by class war, and received Roman garrisons as a protection of property owners against a rising plebs.32 Tarentum was obstinate, and called over to her aid Pyrrhus, King of Epirus. This gallant warrior, fevered with memories of Achilles and Alexander, crossed the Adriatic with an Epirote force, defeated the Romans at Heraclea (280), and gave an adjective to European languages by mourning the costliness of his victory.33 All the Greek cities of Italy now joined him, and the Lucanians, Bruttians, and Samnites declared themselves his allies. He dispatched Cineas to Rome with offers of peace, and freed his 2000 Roman prisoners on their word to return if Rome preferred war. The Senate was about to make terms when old blind Appius Claudius, who had long since retired from public life, had himself carried to the senate house and demanded that Rome should never make peace with a foreign army on Italian soil. The Senate sent back to Pyrrhus the prisoners whom he had released, and resumed the war. The young king won another victory; then, disgusted with the sloth and cowardice of his allies, he sailed with his depleted army to Sicily. He relieved the Carthaginian siege of Syracuse and drove the Carthaginians from nearly all their possessions on the island; but his imperious rule offended the Sicilian Greeks, who thought they could have freedom without order and courage; they withdrew their support, and Pyrrhus returned to Italy, saying of Sicily, “What a prize I leave to be fought for by Carthage and Rome!” His army met the Romans at Beneventum, where for the first time he suffered defeat (275); the light-armed and mobile maniples proved superior to the unwieldy phalanxes, and began a new chapter in military history. Pyrrhus appealed to his Italian allies for new troops; they refused, doubting his fidelity and persistence. He returned to Epirus, and died an adventurer’s death in Greece. In that same year (272) Milo betrayed Tarentum to Rome. Soon all the Greek cities yielded, the Samnites sullenly surrendered, and Rome was at last, after two centuries of war, the ruler of Italy.
The conquest was quickly consolidated with colonies, some sent out by the Latin League, some by Rome. These colonies served many purposes: they relieved unemployment, the pressure of population upon the means of subsistence, and consequent class strife in Rome; they acted as garrisons or loyal nuclei amid disaffected subjects, provided outposts and outlets for Roman trade, and raised additional food for hungry mouths in the capital; conquests in Italy were completed with the plow soon after they had been begun by the sword. In these ways hundreds of Italian towns that still live today received their foundation or their Romanization. The Latin language and culture were spread throughout a peninsula still largely polyglot and barbarous, and Italy was slowly forged into a united state. The first step had been taken in a political synthesis brutal in execution, majestic in result.
But in Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, and Africa, closing the western Mediterranean to Roman trade, and imprisoning Italy in her own seas, stood a power older and richer than Rome.
I An as would now be equivalent in purchasing power to approximately six cents of United States currency in 1942. Cf. p. 78.
II The term respublica (the public property, or commonwealth) was applied by the Romans to all three forms of their state—monarchy, “democracy,” and principate; historians now agree in limiting it to the period between 508 and 49 B.C.
III Quaestor from quaerere, to inquire—hence a trial was a quaestio; aedile from aedes, building; praetor from prae-ire, to go in advance, to lead—hence the cohort that watched over him was called the Praetorian Guard.
IV Manipulus meant a handful of hay, ferns, etc.; attached to a pole this seems to have formed a primitive military standard; hence the word came to mean a body of soldiers serving under the same ensign.
V Livy’s story 30 that at the last moment Camillus refused to hand over the gold, and drove the Gauls out by force, is now by common consent rejected as an invention of Roman pride. No nation is ever defeated in its textbooks.
VI This war was marked by two probably legendary deeds. One consul, Publius Decius, rode to his death amid the enemy as a sacrifice to win the aid of the gods for Rome; the other consul, Titus Manlius Torquatus, beheaded his son for winning an engagement by disobeying orders.31