CHAPTER XV

ROME AND HER NEIGHBOURS IN THE FIFTH CENTURY BC

I.

ROME, LATIUM AND THE HERNICI AT THE BEGINNING OF THE FIFTH CENTURY

THE opening decades of the fifth century were a period of outstanding importance in Italian history. If republican Rome had been strong enough to retain unimpaired the authority in Latium which had been wielded by the latest kings, the process whereby Italian unity was finally achieved might have been set in motion two hundred years before it actually began. In Italian affairs the first and gravest issue presented after the monarchy collapsed was this—Should the fifth century see an extension of Roman influence towards Campania and the south? Or should Rome’s political horizon still be fixed along the boundaries of Latium? The question was simple and the answer plain. So far from building still further on the foundations laid during the regal age, Rome was to feel the foundations themselves give way. Instead of winning new conquests outside the Latin region, she was first to lose ground in Latium itself; and the history of her external affairs for a century and a quarter before the coming of the Gauls is a tale of very varied fortune, in which the final gain is small. First, for more than half a century Rome is on the defensive, holding her own indeed, though nothing more. And secondly, after a breathing space of twenty years, comes a brief period of Roman success. Enemies who had lately been an aggressive danger were brought definitely under control: Veii itself was captured: and on two fronts the way lay open for a new advance. Then came the Gauls, and the fulfilment of Rome’s promise was again postponed. The achievement of the fifth century was not indeed thrown away, but though its potential value remained, its immediate result was to leave Rome, when gains and losses had been cancelled out, very much where she had stood when the century began.

The troubles of Rome were due in part to the advance of peoples who had hitherto lain outside her ken, but in the first place to a movement in Latium against Roman supremacy. Out of the confusion in which Tarquinius Superbus disappears nothing emerges save the fact that Rome was compelled to meet serious onslaughts from more enemies than one. The evidence does not admit of a detailed narrative, and the suggestion that Porsenna was so far successful as to dismantle the walls of Rome is scarcely more a hypothesis designed to explain the ease with which the city was captured by the Gauls a century or so later. Nothing more can be said than that the young Republic defeated all attempts at a monarchical restoration and faced the future under the leadership of an oligarchy whose outlook was definitely Latin. But from the monarchy the government of republican Rome seems to have inherited at least enough of patriotic ambition to cling with such tenacity as it could command to that hegemony in Latium which the kings had at length secured. If the first treaty between Rome and Carthage is rightly dated by Polybius1, it implies a very natural attempt by the Republic to claim the reversion of that predominant position among the Latin cities  which Rome had shown most clearly during the career of the second Tarquin. The combination, however, of Etruscan efforts to retain a foothold on the Latin bank and of Latin movements against a Rome which was weakened by other commitments soon destroyed the prospect of an easy succession to the legacy of the sixth century.

The first incident after the expulsion of the kings which can be accepted as historical is the struggle between Rome and the Latin cities, which culminated at the battle of Lake Regillus and was ended by the treaty associated with the name of Spurius Cassius Vecellinus. In the period of the Etruscan retreat to the Tiber certain Latin cities seem to have formed combinations whose object was to secure Latium for the Latins. One such union is perhaps recorded by the inscription quoted in a fragment of Cato’s Origines: lucum Dianium in nemore Aricino Egerius Laeuius Tusculanus dedicauit dictator Latinus. hi populi communiter: Tusculanus, Aricinus, Lanuuinus, Laurens, Coranus, Tiburtis, Pometinus, Ardeatis Rutulus. In this document the small number of the members, which suggests that it cannot be earlier than a time when the larger states of Latium had absorbed many of their more insignificant neighbours, combines with the presence of Pometia and the absence of Signia and Norba to indicate a date at the end of the sixth century. Moreover, the omission of Rome from so influential a league may be evidence that the humbling of Rome—an achievement perhaps made possible by the expulsion of the kings—was at least one of the purposes for which the league was formed. But though this organization may well belong to the period of Rome’s weakness during the infancy of the Republic, it would be rash to see in it the federation with which the foedus Cassianum was concluded. The league which finally compelled Rome to exchange her hegemony for the position of an equal undoubtedly had its headquarters ad caput (aquae) Ferentinae. Since it must have been under Latin, and not under Roman, control, the long-accepted theory which identified it with a spring near Marino cannot be received; but the search for a more plausible site has reached no definite result. On the whole, in spite of doubts recently expressed, probability favours a location somewhere in the direction of Aricia, though the aqua Ferentina cannot reasonably be sought in the nemus Aricinum itself. If Livy indicates a point near the track along which the Via Appia was built, his evidence tends against any attempt to find the caput aquae on the north side of the Lago di Nemi, where the sanctuary of Diana lay. Thus if the aqua Ferentina and the nemus Aricinum cannot be associated, though both may have been within the territory of Aricia, it is unsafe to identify the league once commanded by Laevius Egerius with the great Latin League of the fifth century.

Though most of the cities mentioned in the inscription at Aricia undoubtedly belonged to the federation which met in the lucus Ferentinae, it cannot be proved that the union whose members are known from the Arician text was the league which concluded the foedus Cassianum and not rather a group of powerful states, formed when the weakening of Etruria seemed to invite a Latin revanche and afterwards developed into a larger organization whose headquarters were no longer in the precinct of Diana but at a spring probably not far away. Of the cities named in the dedication, Lavinium, Ardea, Lanuvium, Aricia with Cora and Pometia behind, and finally Tusculum lay in a continuous line round the frontiers of Roman territory from a point near Ostia as far as Gabii. But there the ring was broken, and of the leading powers in the league Tibur alone remained. From the other members Tibur was cut off. Between Tusculum and the ager Tiburtinus Labici, Pedum and, above all, Praeneste seem to have stood aloof; nor were Nomentum and Crustumerium enrolled to fill the gap between the western boundaries of Tibur and the river. The evidence for later developments whereby the league was enlarged is too scanty to justify speculation about details. The list of thirty cities, given by Dionysius  as those which belonged to a league directed against Rome, is shown to be a late invention by its alphabetical order, by its inclusion of Laurentum as well as Lavinium, and by other indications; but it is clear that all the really formidable opponents of Roman supremacy in Latium are to be found in the list of peoples whose names have been preserved by Cato. They formed the nucleus of the Latin alliance which Rome was called upon to face in the early years of the fifth century.

The traditional account of the struggle between Rome and the Latin states united to throw off her hegemony is heavily loaded with matter which has no right to be regarded as historical. In the whole narrative only two features need be seriously considered—the battle of Lake Regillus and the foedus Cassianum. Of the battle it is possible to say little more than that it was fought, that on the Latin side a leading part was played by Tusculum, and that the issue was something less than a complete victory for Rome. Neither of the dates offered by antiquity—499 and 496—can be accepted with any confidence, because one of these two years, in which the consulship was held by the heroes of the battle—T. Aebutius (499) and A. Postumius Albus (496)—was an obvious choice for later annalists whose passion for precision outran the information at their command. Again, the purely Greek origin of the tale which told how the Dioscuri intervened cannot be refuted, nor can the interest of third-century Rome in Regillus be proved, by the reverse type adopted for Roman denarii when the issue of these coins began in 268 BC. In this context the two horsemen are certainly meant to represent the Penates Populi Romani, and they are without any kind of reference to fifth-century history. But though much of the later Roman account must be rejected as worthless accretion, accretions demand a solid foundation: the tradition of the battle itself would be inexplicable unless some kind of battle had taken place, and without a war between Rome and the Latins the foedus Cassianum would scarcely be intelligible. If this treaty can be accepted with the confidence which the evidence seems to justify, it implies a battle in circumstances which tradition ascribes to the battle of Lake Regillus. Treaty and battle hang together, and both may be received. But though a battle was fought, little more about it can be said. The prominence of Tusculum in the dedication of the nemus Aricinum lends a certain plausibility to the tale that in the campaign of Regillus Tusculum was prominent. The lake itself is probably to be identified with the Pantano Secco near Tusculum itself, but of the Tusculan general—Octavius (or Octavus) Mamilius—it would be rash to say whether he is historical or not. To this nothing further can be added except that the terms of the foedus Cassianum contain a strong suggestion that shortly before the conclusion of that agreement Rome had fought a battle against the Latins with a result rather less glorious than the victory of which the Dioscuri were alleged to have brought the news to Rome.

The evidence for the foedus Cassianum is as good as evidence for the early fifth century in Italy can be. Livy makes casual reference to the preservation of its text inscribed on a bronze stele, and Cicero adds that within his own memory this document had stood before the Rostra, where it was an object of common knowledge. Its removal was probably made necessary by Sulla’s changes at the western end of the Forum. Dionysius gives the terms. Between Rome and the Latins there was to be perpetual peace. Neither side was to invite attacks on the other by third parties, or to give unmolested passage through its territory to enemies of the other. If one side were attacked, the other was to give the defence every assistance in its power; and each contracting party was to take half the booty won in such wars as were conducted by both parties together. Suits arising out of private contracts were to be tried within ten days at the place where the contract at issue had been made. And, finally, no alteration in the terms of the treaty was to be admitted without the unanimous agreement of the Latins and of Rome. There is no need to argue at length that the account given by Dionysius is a mere summary and not a complete translation of the treaty; but definite proof of his omissions is perhaps to be found in a passage from a ‘foedus Latinum’ preserved by Festus—though it is rash, as is often done, to assume that the instrument from which this quotation comes is the foedus Cassianum—and in a remark of the grammarian Cincius for which Festus again is responsible. From Cincius’ somewhat unconvincing description of the way in which a ‘praetor’ was chosen at Rome in those years when it was Rome’s business to supply a commander for the combined forces of herself and the Latins, it is possible to argue that the treaty contained some arrangement which secured annual alternation between Rome and the League in the provision of a generalissimo when such an officer was needed. But though the account of Dionysius is not complete, there cannot be any serious doubt that it is no mere invention but a substantially accurate summary of the text which had still been standing in the Forum three-quarters of a century before he wrote. For its accuracy there is strong evidence in its failure to support the annalists’ repeated suggestion that during the fifth century Rome was, not the mere equal ally, but the leader of the Latin League. If his report may be accepted, Dionysius adds another fact. His version, and particularly what it has to say about the distribution of booty ‘from wars fought in common’ makes it clear that the agreement was no mere domestic arrangement made inside the Latin League to curb the excessive pretensions of Rome, but a treaty between two powers whose independence of one another proves that Rome was wholly outside the League1.

The date of the treaty has provoked discussions which for the most part add nothing to our knowledge of Roman history. It appears from the passage of Livy that on the stele in the Forum the name of a certain Spurius Cassius was mentioned as that of a consul at the time when the agreement was concluded; and, according to the Fasti, Sp. Cassius Vecellinus was consul three times—502, 493 and 486 BC. To the second of these years the treaty is assigned by tradition. Modern speculations which seek to set tradition aside vary over roughly a century in their choice of an alternative date. The limits may be put at 380 and 280 BC. At the start, all theories advocating a time later than 338 may be dismissed, because from that year onwards no Latin league was in existence with which such a treaty could be made. There remain suggestions to the effect that the renewal in 358 by Rome and the Latins of the ‘foedus vetustum, quod multis intermiserant annis,’ which is recorded by Livy, was really the renewal of a treaty made, not at the beginning of the fifth century, but earlier in the fourth. If it is true to say that during the closing years of the monarchy Rome exercised an extensive authority in Latium, the foedus Cassianum, which leaves the Latin cities masters of their own fates, must belong to a period in which Rome’s fortunes had sustained a reverse. In spite of the successes which she had lately won against the Volsci, the Aequi and, above all, against southern Etruria, the great Gallic invasion might possibly account for the weakness of Rome at the time of the negotiations with Latium. But when the Gauls arrived, Roman prospects were bright; and the Gallic menace was a somewhat transitory cloud. Though such a date is not wholly inconceivable, the years following the departure of the Gauls are not the most plausible period for a display of Roman humility. But the most powerful argument against such a reconstruction is the absence of any cogent reason for departing from tradition. Unless the account of early Latium accepted here is wholly wrong, there did exist a Latin league in the fifth century with which Rome might make a treaty, Again, if the view taken above of Roman activities under the later kings is right, early in the fifth century Rome unquestionably did suffer a set-back of the kind which the traditions of Regillus and the foedus Cassianum combine to suggest. The fact that the Cassii of later centuries are plebeians is, in the opinion of the present writer, no argument against the appearance of a Cassius in the Fasti about 500 BC. And finally, though chronological precision is not to be supposed, scepticism cannot be allowed its claim that the Fasti preserve no serious record of the men who governed Rome in the time of Cleisthenes and Themistocles.

The course of events after the expulsion of the kings thus seems to be that for a moment, marked by the first treaty with Carthage, Rome tried to maintain the position she had enjoyed in the time of Tarquinius Superbus, but that before long the Latin cities began to combine in an attempt to free themselves from external control, whether Roman or Etruscan. Between Rome and the Latin League there followed a war wherein the pretensions of Rome were so far reduced that she agreed to live outside the Latin federation and to refrain from attempts at political control. Such were the circumstances of the foedus Cassianum. At that point, however, matters could not rest. Rome and the Latins alike were confronted with dangers which gave each party need of the other’s help. Across the Tiber the Etruscans were still an active menace, and behind the Alban hills Aequi and Volsci were advancing.

The strongholds of the Volsci in the Monti Lepini were divided from the Aequian country by the valley of the Trerus, and in this valley lived a people of uncertain ethnical connections—the Hernici. Their territory was small, but such few cities as they could claim had formed themselves into a league of which the most considerable member was Anagnia. With this league Rome had perhaps come into contact before the end of the sixth century, but it was at some time soon after the conclusion of the foedus Cassianum that Rome and the Latins took the Hernici into partnership to form a triple alliance. Of the circumstances in which Rome gained this new support the accounts of Dionysius and Livy are suspect. Though in detail they diverge, in general they agree that the Hernican alliance was secured by Sp. Cassius in his third consulship (486 BC) and that it was the outcome of fighting between the Hernici and Rome.

Livy alone is responsible for the suggestion that part of the Hernican territory was earmarked for division by the abortive lex agraria which Cassius is alleged to have proposed. In all this it is difficult to take seriously anything more than the implication that the treaty with the Hernici was made soon after the foedus Cassianum. Since the terms between Rome and the Hernici were supposed to be identical with those on which Rome and the Latins had agreed2, it was natural to make Sp. Cassius the negotiator of the second treaty as well as of the first. Though this may have been the case, it is too obvious an inference, which some annalist may have drawn, to be accepted with even the slightest confidence. And again, though their position between Aequi and Volsci— both of whom at this time were aggressive—may have made the Hernici anxious for the help of Rome, the suggestion that they purchased her alliance by a surrender of territory is even more difficult to believe. With Etruria still pressing her from the north and with the Volscian danger imminent in the south, Rome was in no position to drive hard bargains with possible supporters, least of all when their support could serve so useful a purpose as that which the Hernici might achieve. To secure a wedge of friendly country in the valley of the Trerus and so to impede a junction of Volscian and Aequian forces was too valuable a gain for Rome to run any risk of its sacrifice. And, finally, the supposed annexation of Hernican territory is made still less convincing by the way in which it is connected with the doubtful tale of the rogatio Cassia agraria.

On the whole it is unsafe to say more than that at some time soon after the treaty between Rome and the Latins was concluded, the two parties made a similar agreement with the league of the Trerus valley. Thus the Roman Campagna was at peace with itself, and in its Hernican allies it had an invaluable buffer between two of its most dangerous enemies—the Volsci and the Aequi. Though dangers from north and south at times grew so great as to call for the united efforts of the three allies on a single front, geography made it the primary business of the Latins and the Hernici to deal with the Aequian and Volscian threat, while Rome’s affair was with Etruria. Such was the condition in which Latium faced its invaders during the fifth century.

II.

THE SABINES AT ROME

In the early years of the Republic, from the fall of the monarchy to the middle of the fifth century, there appear scattered and disconnected allusions to trouble between Rome and the Sabines. These Sabines were a northern outlier of the great Oscan-speaking people and they formed a link, running east of Latium, which joined the main Oscan region to the Umbrian country in the north. Though there is a narrow strip beyond the Anio which has some claim to be regarded as Latin from the first, the Tiber from Orta to Antemnae, and the Anio thence to its upper waters, may roughly be said to mark the extreme limits of Sabine occupation. It was with the south-western borders of this area that the Romans found themselves in contact.

The Sabines were a unit only in an ethnic sense. Though they seem to have thought that the district round Reate had been the peculiar home of the stock from which they sprang, the communities of which this people was composed were politically disunited. In the progress towards political federation they lagged far behind neighbours like the Hernici and the Latins, and consequently the danger which they threatened to the Latin plain was slight. When the pressure of population along the central Apennine, which in the end brought the Aequi to the frontiers of Latium, thrust onwards the Sabine communities in its way, the Sabines came in groups so small that Rome found it easy to repel such as were not allowed to settle in Roman territory. It would be unprofitable to examine in detail the whole of such scanty records as are preserved of Sabine movements in the sixty years which follow the establishment of the Republic at Rome; but in the history which begins in 505 BC and ends with the defeat of the Sabines in 449 after their victory of the previous year there are two episodes which repay consideration. The first is the arrival of Attius Clausus in Rome. In 505, according to the reckoning of Livy, when Rome and the Sabines were in conflict, a section of the Sabine people which preferred peace to war migrated into Roman territory under the leadership of this chief. Attius Clausus, henceforward known as Appius Claudius, was admitted to the patriciate and soon became a leader in the state, and his whole following were granted Roman citizenship and settled on lands beyond the Anio. Such was the advent of the Claudian gens. The second is the affair of Appius Herdonius, placed by Livy in 460. With a suddenness and lack of preliminaries which recall the mysterious recovery of Sardes by the Persians in 498, Appius Herdonius, with a Sabine army of 2500 men, was found one night in possession of the Capitolium at Rome. In the circumstances which follow, so large a part is played by conflicts between tribunes and Senate, which are woven into the narrative of the agrarian agitation, that the tale is more relevant to the constitutional and economic development than to the history of Rome’s relations with her neighbours. At last, however, the Capitoline was stormed, Herdonius was killed, and those of his followers who survived were put to death in ways appropriate to their varying conditions.

These incidents, trivial in themselves, deserve notice for the part they play in a theory which has won wide acceptance, but which, nevertheless, is almost certainly to be rejected. It is the view of Pais that the expulsion of the Etruscans from Latium was the work, not of the Latins themselves, but of Sabine invaders, that Rome was conquered by the Sabines in the first half of the fifth century, and that of this conquest, which was not completed at a single stroke, we have such records as Roman tradition was prepared to admit in stories like those of Attius Clausus and Appius Herdonius. The end of this Sabine incoming is said to be marked by the Roman victory of 449, after which nothing more is heard of Sabines until the Samnite wars.

Such speculations call for the utmost caution: written history, language and archaeology alike provide grounds for scepticism. It would be unwise to deny the possibility that the Roman version of a foreign conquest of the city was garbled in the interests of patriotic pride; and, if they were unsupported by independent facts, the accounts given by Livy and his kind might justly be treated with suspicion. For what they are worth, however, their tale is clear. In the population of Rome there was a strong element described as Sabine, to which some of the greatest gentes like the Claudii and Valerii belonged, but the presence of this element was the result of gradual infiltration spread over several centuries and not of any sudden irruption which would justify the use of phrases like a Sabine conquest of Rome. Already in the time of Romulus Titus Tatius is made a Sabine, and later the same is said, with much plausibility, of Numa; but neither in the regal period nor in any later age is there the slightest sign that a Sabine army fought its way to Rome and gained permanent control of the city. Were there any reason to believe in a catastrophic coming of the Sabines at all, it would be easy, as De Sanctis has observed, to show that it should not be placed in the years to which it is assigned by Pais. In the first half of the fifth century the silence of tradition about any such event is confirmed by the evidence of the Fasti, which show no sudden break in the control exercised by the great patrician houses such as would have been the inevitable consequence of foreign conquest. But if this consideration is enough to cast doubts on the reality of Sabine immigration on a large scale in the only period in which it has been claimed to find evidence for Sabine domination at Rome, other facts suggest that at no time was Rome a Sabine city. Linguistic indications are as clearly opposed to the suggestion that Rome was suddenly occupied by a large and permanent Sabine population as they are to the theory of extensive Etruscan settlement. Among the Italic dialects the speech of .the Sabine population before it fell under the influence of Rome is definitely remote from Latin and Faliscan and connected most closely with the Oscan side of the Osco-Umbrian group. Traces of Sabine influence in the speech of Rome, if they were present, would be easy to detect; but, except in a few personal names like that of Numa Pompilius, there are very few that, in the opinion of the present writer, can be regarded as certain. The conclusion to be drawn about the Sabine element in Rome is plain: whatever its total numbers may have been, it was not enough to submerge the Latin-speaking people. Whether the immigrants were few all told, or whether a gradual immigration finally reached large dimensions, the Sabines came to Rome in a way which allowed them to be absorbed by the existing inhabitants of the site so completely that their language was obliterated.

The view that the Sabines penetrated Rome by slow degrees and over a long period of time finds its final confirmation in the evidence of material remains. The Sabine country falls within the region where in the early iron age the regular method of disposing of the dead still was inhumation; and when the plain of Latium became fit for human habitation it was from the Sabine country and neighbouring parts of the same cultural area that an inhuming people made its way to the homes of the Latins and the Faliscans. This people, it is true, found itself forestalled on the site of Rome by the cremators from the north, but traces of its presence can be recognized in the cemetery of the Forum by the end of the ninth century at latest; and from that time onwards the strength of the inhuming settlement continued to increase until it came to dominate the outer hills. The numbers and importance of this people must not be ignored. The mass of primitive inhumations opened at various spots from the Quirinal to the Esquiline suggests an occupation that was dense, and the fact that this colony provided Rome with one of the most famous figures in the regal canon is indication enough of its importance. There are even signs preserved of the independent lives led at one stage by the communities of this region. The existence of a college of Salii Collini side by side with those of the Palatine and perhaps still more the references to a Capitolium Vetus on the Quirinal may be accepted as memorials of an age when the Sabine immigrants still retained a separate organization of their own. But in spite of the claim to superior antiquity implied by calling the Sabine Capitolium the Capitolium Vetus, when the time came for one or other of the two elements in the population of Rome to assert itself over the whole, it was the cremators of the Palatine and their Latin language which prevailed. Though in some matters the Sabines may have affected the Palatine people, though they certainly clung long to their burial rite and may even have communicated it for a time to some members of the other ethnic stratum, it is to the Palatine that we must look for the more powerful element in the days when the Roman stock was being formed. The influence of the cremators may be explained in part by their earlier presence on the site, but the explanation demands the further assumption that tradition is right in holding that the Sabine immigration was spread over three centuries at least and that at no time were its numbers more than the original settlers could absorb. Of a sudden invasion there is no valid evidence, and the incidents recorded between 505 and 449 BC are only the closing phase of an infiltration of inhumers from the eastern highlands which had begun even before the regal period itself.

III.

THE VOLSCIAN ADVANCE

In the struggle between Rome and Veii the prize of victory was the control of the lower Tiber; but the invasions from the south, which occupied the Latin stage during the first half of the fifth century, were movements of population from the surrounding mountains set in motion by the pressure of economic conditions rather than political attacks on Rome or any other power. Besides the line of the Tiber itself where Rome faced southern Etruria, three distinct zones on the northern and eastern borders of the Campagna became theatres of war before Latium at length won freedom from external interference. Between Tiber and Anio the Sabines advanced; the main thrust of the Aequi was delivered from a base between the Anio and the Praeneste gap; and the passage between the Alban hills and the sea was the natural route of Volscian invasions.

In the sixth century the Volsci descended from the slopes of the Apennine somewhere west of the Fucine Lake towards the coastal plain between Latium and Campania, and already in the times of the Tarquins tradition brings them into conflict with Rome over the possession of Suessa Pometia. If Livy is wrong in his assertion that they were ejected from this place by Tarquinius Superbus, the appearance of the populus Pometinus in the dedication of Nemi must be explained by a denial that Pometia had fallen into Volscian hands before the end of the monarchy. That the first contact between the Volsci and Rome has been antedated by tradition is possible, since the most intelligible opportunity for a Volscian advance to the sea is provided by the general collapse of Etruscan authority south of the Tiber, in which the overthrow of the Roman kingship is a part. But the anticipation is small. At latest it was only a few years after 500 BC that the invaders appeared in the district to the south-east of the Alban hills, and it was at this time that they either founded or occupied the city which retained its Volscian character as long as any: this was Velitrae. But Velitrae and Pometia were on the frontiers of the Volscian region, where resistance from the Latins was inevitable, and it is to be supposed that farther south, where Volscian control of Antium and (probably) Anxur on the coast and further inland of the mysterious Ecetra was alleged, the invaders had already won a foothold before they attempted an extension to the north. When the time came for the northward advance to be begun, the newcomers seem to have encountered opposition strong enough to deny them any permanent foothold in the Roman Campagna.

According to the traditional account, Velitrae was besieged and recovered, and the Latin front against the Volscians was strengthened by the foundation of colonies at Signia and Norba. The dates and details with which the narratives of these events are provided can make no claims to accuracy, but the incidents themselves are plausible to the extent that they mark a successful Latin stand against Volscian advance at a time when such success is implied by less disputable evidence. It is not to be doubted that by the end of the sixth century the Volsci had reached the coastal plain; and, in bringing them soon afterwards as near the Latin strongholds as Velitrae, tradition is to some extent confirmed by archaeology. But west of Velitrae they leave no trace, and the stoppage of their expansion at a point reached soon after 500 BC is assumed by everything recorded of their attacks on Latium during the rest of the fifth century.

Of these attacks the first is the most famous, but it is like the rest in being recorded, so far as the Campagna is concerned, not as an enduring conquest of new territory so much as a sudden raid on the rich lands towards the Tiber. The story of Coriolanus is one whose outstanding merits do not include any notable contribution to our knowledge of the Volscian wars. That the figure of Coriolanus contains a kernel of fact is certain, nor is an episode so curious as the invasion of Latium which he directs likely to be pure invention. Again, of the elements which constitute the legend in its latest form some at least are additions belonging so obviously to other times that they may be discarded without damaging the reputation of the residue. The hero’s refusal to allow the plebs a distribution of corn presented to the state, unless they agreed to the surrender of their tribunes, is more like fiction of the second century than history of the fifth; and the dedication of a temple to Fortuna Muliebris on the spot where Coriolanus was at length persuaded by his mother to spare his native town is an aetiological figment which needs no comment.

But even when such features have been discarded what remains is difficult to understand. Questions about the name of Coriolanus cannot be answered. Whether he is merely the man or founder of Corioli or the conqueror of that place is an open issue; but, whatever view is taken of the probabilities, the value of his career as evidence for the course of Roman relations with the Volsci is unaffected. If Coriolanus be Roman or if, in spite of his connection with the Marcian gens, he be Volscian in origin, the main task of criticism is still to decide whether the campaigns with which he is connected are wholly mythical or not. In this case, unfortunately, decision is made more difficult than usual by the peculiarity which Niebuhr rightly stressed. Like Horatius Codes, Coriolanus hangs in air. His name does not appear in the Fasti— a fact of which elaborate explanations were evolved; he belongs to a gens otherwise unrepresented among the officers of the early republican period; and the personnel of his story, at least until quite late times, is as much out of touch with the framework of fifth-century history as Coriolanus himself. Whatever the reasons for which the annalists chose 491 and the following years, they were not good: indeed it is a familiar criticism that few years could be less suitable for a Volscian thrust to the gates of Rome than one immediately after Rome and Latium had composed their differences and agreed to present united opposition to attack. Thus arguments from probability, which would have been available if dates were even approximately fixed, in this case are impossible; and nothing but the outline of the tale remains. At worst it tells nothing, and at best little more than that at some point in the first half of the fifth century the Volscians for a moment penetrated clean across the Campagna to Rome.

Those who believe that legend, however much elaborated, rests on some foundation of fact may perhaps accept the raid on Rome on such evidence as this. But an episode so devoid of permanent results is of the smallest importance: it is another and less famous feature of the story which calls for more regard. The list, given by Dionysius and Livy of towns which the Volscians are said to have acquired under the guidance of their king Attius Tullius and of Coriolanus is in parts open to grave suspicion: some of the alleged conquests are in regions which the Volsci held from the time of their earliest descent to the littoral plain, and others are in places where no permanent Volscian occupation can be admitted. But one group of names, among which Labici and Pedum are the most familiar, is marked out from the rest by the way in which it bears on later history. The implication of those conquests, if they are true, must be that the Volscians pushed northwards from Velitrae close along the eastern frontier of Tusculum towards the Aequian country. The significance of such a movement is clear: its effect would be to cut off the Hernici from Latium and to open communications between the Volsci and the active mountain tribes whose front against Latium stretched from the Trerus to the Anio. Though there is no need to insist on any part Coriolanus may have played in this advance, the advance itself may be believed, because in the narratives of wars towards the middle of the fifth century—narratives which are certainly sounder than those of fifty years before—-joint action by Aequi and Volsci is regularly assumed. But in this later phase it is the Aequi who take the lead, and with the tale of Coriolanus— a tale whose information about the fifth century is negligible in comparison with the light it throws on the character of the Roman people—the independent operations of the Volsci may be left.

IV.

THE WARS WITH THE AEQUI

The mountain homes from which the Aequi advanced on Latium seem to have lain north-west of the Fucine Lake on the country between Carsioli and the Avens. Their southward movement first calls for notice when it has brought them to the line of the Anio, and their progress becomes a serious danger to Latium when they cross the river on a wide front from Tibur to the source. On the right flank the Latins held their own, and, though it was perhaps the scene of fighting, the ager Tiburtinus did not pass under any enduring occupation by the enemy. With the left flank it was the business of the Hernici to deal; but about the fortunes of war in this direction, where Rome was only distantly concerned, our information is too slight to justify any confident assertion. It was in the centre that the Aequi won their chief success, and with the centre Roman tradition for the most part is concerned. From the middle Anio they pushed in a south-westerly direction round the borders of Tiburtine territory until they reached the Algidus gap and appeared in Latium at Tusculum. The implications of this progress are clear. There is no need to suggest that it involved a passage through the ager Tiburtinus, and still less to base on this unstable ground speculations about the possibility of Tibur having been in origin an Aequian foundation. With Praeneste, however, the case is different. Praeneste, unlike Tibur, is absent from the inscription of Nemi, and it is hard to see how the Aequi reached their position above Tusculum without encroaching on the Praenestine country. Under these circumstances, though confidence is impossible, it is at least not unlikely that the decline of Praeneste from the position she had held in the seventh century is to be explained by her passing into Aequian hands after the Etruscans had withdrawn. And what may be true of Praeneste is no less possible of Pedum and Labici, where the Aequi perhaps found themselves in contact with their Volscian friends.

In the detailed story of the Aequian attack the evidence of Dionysius and Livy, which for the Volscian wars stands virtually alone, receives support from the more credible testimony of Diodorus. According to Diodorus (xi, 40, 5) the Romans attacked the Aequian or phil-Aequian occupants of Tusculum as early as 484 and ejected them from the city. From that time onwards for thirty years the Aequi seem to have hovered round the Algidus and won possession, more or less secure, of the places east of Frascati. The frontier struggles, in which the Latins generally contrived, with the help of Rome, to prevent the Aequian and Volscian invaders from debouching on the Campagna, are without interest or importance until, in a year identified by tradition with 462 BC, a hostile thrust, more violent than usual, produced a crisis which culminated in the first of the two dictatorships ascribed to L. Quinctius Cincinnatus.

In spite of its many improbabilities, the brief career of Cincinnatus contains more of value for fifth-century history than all the detailed stories told of Coriolanus. It must be admitted that knowledge of dictatorships at so early a stage as this may rest wholly on unofficial records, if on documentary evidence at all, and it is not in favour of such claims to the consulship of 460 BC as Cincinnatus can advance that in the Fasti Capitolini he appears only as consul suffectus. But Cincinnatus differs from Coriolanus in two important respects. He belongs to a gens which played a leading part in Rome for a hundred years after the middle of the fifth century, and the minor figures of his story are wholly apposite to the period in which they are set. In the legend, of Coriolanus the Volscian war is the only important element which can be accepted as sound; but in the case of Cincinnatus the figure of the hero himself is at least plausible, as well as the business with which he is concerned. As always, much of the detail must be rejected. The voluntary exile of his son Kaeso and the forfeiture of the vadimonium, together with the conflicts between Cincinnatus himself and the tribunate and his opposition to the rogatio Terentilia for the appointment of a commission to define the consular imperium, belong to that least credible department of tradition which is concerned with the origin of public institutions. Nor again need much notice be taken either of the picturesque details of the dictator’s appointment or of the extraordinary methods of war whereby he succeeds in rescuing the consul’s army on the Algidus and definitely defeating the Aequian blockaders. But in spite of this, and in spite of confusions between Cincinnatus and other Quinctii of the fifth century, the figure of the dictator is at bottom historical; and the campaign he conducts in the eastern hills, however much the Roman version may indulge in its habitual exaggeration of the part played by Rome and neglect the Latin share, may be accepted as characteristic of the warfare which went on before the issue between the Aequi and the peoples of the plain was finally decided.

The decision came, according to the Roman vulgate, with the dictatorship of A. Postumius Tubertus in 431 BC. The similarity between the achievements of Tubertus and those of Cincinnatus is marked, and there was an obvious tendency at Rome to connect their respective careers and to confuse the details. At the outset Tubertus is made father-in-law of Cincinnatus’ son, and it is the younger Cincinnatus who names Tubertus dictator. Moreover there was a danger of the circumstances on the Algidus, with which Tubertus was called upon to deal, being assimilated to those that confronted Cincinnatus. Livy records a version, which he rejects, according to which the reason for the dictator’s appointment was a consular defeat—a defeat which looks strangely like an attempted duplication of the reverse from whose results L. Minucius had been rescued by Cincinnatus. And again the tactics used on the two occasions have much in common. But in spite of these grounds for suspicion and in spite of other features —one of which, the dictator’s sentence of his son to death for a military crime, Livy himself1 prefers not to believe in the prevailing conflict of opinion—the story is historically valuable. Though Tubertus is otherwise known only as magister equitum to Aemilius Mamercus Mamercinus in 434, he bears a name which is not, like that of Marcius Coriolanus, unique in the fifth century. His name, however, and his personal relations do not call for so much notice as the final relief of Aequian pressure on the Algidus, There is no room for doubt about the decisive victory of the Latin defence at this time. It has rightly been observed that the traditional accounts of the campaign gain authority from the record, remarkable in such a context as this, of the day—16, 17 or 18 June—on which the final battle was fought. The rarity of such precision outside the Fasti triumphales shows that details like this were not regular subjects of invention at Rome, and the appearance of so exact a date in the narrative here is not easy to explain unless the date be true. But the most cogent fact in favour of the tale is that a victory such as it relates is manifestly implied by the easy Roman penetration of country which the Aequi had lately held when the well-authenticated Roman offensive is opened soon after 420. For that reason alone it might be agreed that the battle of the Algidus, said to have been fought in 431, is tradition’s version of an historical victory which, after a struggle for sixty years or more, finally destroyed the menace of an Aequian advance and freed Latium for good from the danger of occupation by this people and its Volscian allies.

The connection between Aequi and Volsci has been doubted, and it is not wholly impossible that the part which the Volsci are made to play in operations round the Algidus is due to mere confusion. It seems more probable, however, that the connection should be accepted. The story of the Volscian progress to the north, in the region between Tusculum and Praeneste, bears no clear signs of invention; and, if it is sound, Aequi and Volsci must have been in the closest contact. Moreover, the battle of the Algidus seems to have a marked effect on Volscian fortunes. In the late forties of the fifth century Volscian activity round Ardea is freely recorded: the plausible tradition of a treaty made with Ardea in 444—a treaty which had apparently been accessible to Licinius Macer—if not the somewhat dubious colonization of the place in 442, suggests serious concern in this quarter, for which the Volsci were almost certainly responsible. But after this the coastal thrust is heard of no more, and the Volscian front in its narrow sense remains quiescent until the Romans pass to the attack. For this cessation of Volscian pressure after 440 b.c. a reason is available in the battle of the Algidus, if that was a conflict between Rome and, not the Aequi alone, but a Volsco-Aequian alliance. In these circumstances it would perhaps be rash to dismiss off-hand the frequent records of Volscian presence near Tusculum, and the rarer hints of Aequian contingents farther south.

V.

THE ROMAN DEFENCE OF THE TIBER

When Etruscan influence in Latium was destroyed, a revival of the ancient dispute about the bridge-heads was inevitable. On the left bank Veii still tried, not without success, to maintain a hold on Fidenae; and on the other side Rome had to fight for its rights to Janiculum and its surroundings. The old contentions for the septem pagi and the salt-pans, whose origin was so early as to gain them a place in the legends of Romulus himself, began afresh after the Tarquins were expelled. Whatever he may represent, Porsenna already seems to have challenged Rome’s claims on the ripa Veientana, as has been said: but for tradition at least the mists in which Porsenna is enwrapped lift within twenty-five years, and in the middle eighties of the fifth century there begins a period of feverish activity on which the information of the authorities is explicit. Until its closing chapters, the value of the story is so slight that it calls for no detailed notice. After a few years of border raiding the Romans were defeated, but in the following campaign (480 BC) the position was recovered by the notable victory of M. Fabius and Cn. Manlius. Next year, however, the Veientanes won their way to the Janiculum, and in this crisis the Fabii came forward to save the state. They fortified a camp on the Cremera—a stream which flowed down from Veii and joined the Tiber opposite Fidenae—and there in 477, under circumstances of which the most widely variant versions are preserved, they were virtually annihilated by the Veientanes. Thereupon Rome was actually besieged: but at this point the Etruscan fortune failed, and in the three more years for which the war went on Roman success was so consistent that in 474 a peace of forty years was made.

However doubtful the details of this history may be, its strategic implications, though they are not stressed or even understood by. tradition, deserve ready acceptance. In her disputes with Rome for control of the lower Tiber and in particular for access to the left bank at Fidenae, Veii was at a disadvantage. Whereas Rome, at least after the foedus Cassianum, could have had Latium behind her if there was any question of an Etruscan revanche, Veii was isolated from the centre of Etruscan power. Her position in the outlying region south of the Monti Cimini made her interests a matter of indifference to the greater cities of Etruria, and left her supported by nothing more than the feeble and intermittent sympathy of Caere. In these circumstances, if Veii was not to antagonize the Latin league, Veientane operations on the left bank of the Tiber were impossible except in the friendly territory of Fidenae; and consequently the fighting is either confined to a narrow region round the lowest course of the Anio or else is wholly conducted on the Etruscan side. In the campaigns themselves the stakes at issue—the bridge-heads—are clearly indicated. After the Veientane dash to Janiculum in 479, the Fabii retort with their block-house on the Cremera—the site of which, somewhere in a direct line between Veii and Fidenae, makes plain its object to deny the Veientanes access to their outpost in Latium.

So far the general scheme of the war is probable enough; but most of the details must be rejected. In the earlier phases movements are on too small a scale for it to be likely that their memory survived from so early a time, and the siege of Rome after the Fabian disaster is suspect for its resemblance to the siege by Porsenna. On the other hand the victory of Fabius and Manlius may well be authentic, and it is impossible seriously to doubt the presence of historical matter in the episode of the Cremera. Because it is not appreciated by tradition, the strategic value of a Roman garrison in this region—a value obvious when the relations between Veii and Fidenae are known—adds probability to the tale. Though in ancient times it was generally overlooked, the plot of the story is more pointed than anything that ordinary invention can boast. And this consideration in its favour is reinforced by a second—that mere fabrication does not normally employ its ingenuity on the excogitation of unfounded disasters. For this reason the affair of the Fabii has a far greater claim to respect than the victory of 480.

Over the details of the defeat it is useless to linger. The recorded accounts show variations, abnormally pronounced, both in the number and circumstances of the victims and on the nature of the Veientane stratagem which compassed their destruction. The latter may be ignored, and on the question of numbers no help can be got from the absurd suggestion that every male member of the Fabian gens perished with one exception. In addition to the three hundred odd Fabii who fell, some of the versions include a body of clients, though on a scale so enormous as to make the result less credible than ever. In a case where no kind of certainty can be expected, the view preserved by Diodorus is as attractive as any. According to this account, Rome and Veii met in the battle on the Cremera, and the Romans sustained a defeat with heavy losses among which three hundred of the casualties were Fabii. If the three hundred Fabii be understood to mean Fabii and their clients, the numbers become possible: and if the campaign is interpreted as one between Veii and the whole Roman state, the difficulty of explaining how Roman interests came to be committed to the care of the Fabii alone—a difficulty which all attempts have failed to surmount—does not arise. If, however, the fight was an incident of ordinary war, it follows that, for a single gens afterwards to have been able to annex the whole glory and responsibility, the battle—and indeed the whole campaign in which it occurred—was of too slight an importance to impress itself permanently on the public traditions. If such a theory makes in the right direction, the history behind the Fabian tale is a defeat inflicted on Rome, with notable losses to the Fabii and their followers, in the course of otherwise undistinguished operations designed to cut the communications between Veii and her crossing of the Tiber. For the rest nothing calls for notice until an honourable peace is made in 474 BC.

With peace comes the question of chronology. No argument for the view that knowledge of this treaty was derived from contemporary documents can be based on the mention of its duration: the forty years recorded may be merely the result of a calculation of the interval between the date to which the disaster of the Cremera was assigned and the year in which hostilities between Rome and Veii broke out again. Nor again can any weight be attached to the placing of the Fabian catastrophe in 477. To the question whether the early fifth century was a period of warfare between Rome and Veii the Etruscan activities after the Roman monarchy fell and certain elements in the tradition of the war itself are enough to justify an answer in the affirmative. If, when the war itself is accepted, it be asked again whether the traditional dates are open to serious criticism, the reply must be that in themselves they are plausible and no better can be found. During the middle of the fifth century Roman operations towards the east imply a freedom from embarrassment in the west. The Etruscan attack on the Tiber line must be put either before or after the worst period of Volscian and Aequian pressure, and between these alternatives the choice is easy. Five years after, even if not before, the battle of the Algidus was fought, there has begun an authentic history of developments along the river which is almost continuous until Veii falls to Rome. Here there is no room for the Fabii and their contemporaries; and the earlier date remains, commended not only by the absence of an alternative but by the support of tradition and by its proximity to the years of Etruscan activity in which Porsenna is the central figure.

The political relations of Fidenae during the first sixty years of the fifth century are a matter of some importance, about which the evidence is bad. Possibly, as Dionysius asserts, the city was captured by Rome soon after 500 BC, but the garrison which T. Larcius is said to have left in possession plays no part in later events and cannot be accepted as permanent. Nevertheless, the implication of this account—that Fidenae was under Roman control until its affairs are heard of again about the time of the battle of the Algidus—is right to the extent that in the treaty assigned to 474 Rome must have insisted that Fidenae should cease to act as a Veientane outpost in Latium; and it may be assumed that throughout the years of peace Fidenate policy was sufficiently free of Etruscan control to give Rome no cause for a renewal of hostilities.

Fidenae is not heard of again until 438. In that year, according to tradition, the city revolted under Veientane promptings and a war began which was ended by a peace concluded in 435. In 426 Fidenae rebelled again, but in the following year a decisive Roman victory imposed another treaty which remained unbroken for twenty years, until the final war with Veii broke out. The operations of 437—435 show suspicious parallels with those of 426—425. In both the dictatorship is held by Aemilius Mamercus and in both the most prominent actor on the Roman side is A. Cornelius Cossus. In the former Cossus is made, as military tribune, to win spolia opima after killing Tolumnius, lars of Veii, with his own hand; and in the latter he is magister equitum to Mamercus in the year of Fidenae’s fall. In details at least, if not in essence, the earlier war is a retrojection of the later.

The claims of the second war to be regarded as the original from which incidents were transferred to the first are adequately vindicated by the one certainly contemporary record which bears on the course of these campaigns. According to Livy tradition had been unanimous in believing that the spolia opima had been won by Cossus as military tribune, until, during his restoration of the temple of Juppiter Feretrius, the Emperor Augustus discovered the linen cuirass stripped from the body of Tolumnius, on which it was recorded that at the time of this exploit Cossus had been consul. The courtly forbearance of Livy to verify the imperial announcement with his own eyes is to be ; but though the word of Augustus is without confirmation, and though the office held by Cossus had an intimate bearing on an issue raised when M. Crassus, governor of Macedonia, killed the Bastarnian Deldo, it cannot be thought probable that Augustus either forged the inscription on the cuirass, or misreported its effect in order to justify his refusal of Crassus’ claim to have won spolia opima on the ground that he did not hold the auspices at the time. It is unnecessary to do more than mention the theory that Augustus misread a contraction of the name ‘Cossus’ as consul. This document may be accepted as conclusive evidence that at the time of his encounter with Tolumnius Cossus was consul, and his consulship falls in 428. Thus a date is fixed for the most famous episode in the struggle with Fidenae: an alternative suggestion of 426, when Cossus was tribunus militum consulari potestate, fails because the assumption that a holder of this office could be described as ‘ consul ’ is inconsistent with what is by far the most credible explanation of the consular tribunate. War, then, had been declared by 428; but since Diodorus records a tale that a battle perhaps to be identified with that in which Cossus won his spolia opima was indecisive, there is no reason to carry the peace back three years from the traditional 425. It seems rather that in chronology, as well as in other details, the operations assigned to the years 438—435 are an anticipation of events which should properly be put precisely ten years later. If this is so, the whole tale of the first war collapses.

If the war is not a mere invention, nothing is known of its course. There is a certain plausibility in the view that the affair of 428—425 was duplicated a decade earlier merely on account of the names borne both by one of the consuls of 437—L. Sergius Fidenas—and by the dictator whose command is placed in 435— Q. Servilius Priscus Structus Fidenas. But, though it is possible that the cognomen is not triumphal, its almost simultaneous appearance in two distinct gentes—both of which were represented in high office at the time and both of which continued to use the name—is best explained, not by their civil connection with Fidenae, but by the participation of the consul and dictator in some earlier and less memorable operations against the city. To this, one other piece of evidence should be added. It is said that, when Fidenae made common cause with Veii in 438, a Roman embassy was sent to protest and that at the instigation of Tolumnius its four members were murdered. The victims of this outrage were commemorated by statues which, though perhaps removed for a time by Sulla, were apparently still to be seen on the Rostra in the first century A.D.; and from these statues our knowledge of their names is undoubtedly derived. This much about these monuments has withstood all the attacks of criticism; but any value they might have as support for the earlier war depends wholly on the presence of some chronological hint in the inscriptions on the base, and the insertion of such information is neither proved nor even probable.

Thus the history of the last effort made by Veii to recover her hold on the Latin bank is confined, so far as we can say, to the years immediately following 42 8. The war alleged to have broken out ten years before rests on the evidence of a tradition which is manifestly contaminated with retrojections, supported, if at all, only by the cognomen acquired by families of the Sergian and Servilian gentes. The second war is undoubtedly historical. Its beginning must be put earlier than the traditional date, because it was in 428 that spolia opima were won by Cossus; but no objection need be taken to that date regularly accepted for its end. Precise accuracy cannot, indeed, be claimed for 425; but this point is certainly near enough to the year when Fidenae finally passed under Roman control for it to be true to say that the long defence of Latium against its various enemies was finally brought to a successful issue when the last quarter of the fifth century began. On the eastern front the enemy’s back had been broken on the Algidus in 431, and to the west the same thing happened in 425. The thirty years which followed saw the opening of the Roman offensive.

VI.

THE EASTERN OFFENSIVE

The advance of Rome into Aequian and Volscian regions is recorded less fully than the offensive on the western front. Unlike the great campaigns which ended with the fall of Veii, the operations round the Alban hills seem to have been designed to win ground rather by persistent nibbling than by any single and decisive victory. This difference in strategy was probably dictated by the different political conditions among the enemy. In southern Etruria authority seems to have been concentrated in the hands of Veii, whereas in the mountains to the east the hostile tribes, at least after the battle of the Algidus, were probably broken up into sections which presented no united opposition. Thus the story of successes between the Tiber and Circeii is an uncoordinated list of scattered acquisitions from which little, if anything, can be divined about the scheme of operations. The general truth of tradition, however, is not in doubt: the incidents which compose the tale are individually too insignificant to have been invented, and their broad implication—that by the time of the Gallic attack Rome had thrust back the Aequi and Volsci until she was in direct contact with Praeneste—is essential to the understanding of fourth-century history.

Against the Aequi activity may have begun already by 423, when C. Sempronius Atratinus was consul, if Verrugo is to be placed in the Aequian rather than the Volscian sector; but it was five years later that Rome won her first valuable acquisition by the conquest of Labici. To this station, important because it could control the Algidus gap, a Roman garrison was sent. ^415 the neighbouring city of Bola was taken, and probably about the same time Carventum was occupied, though our only information about its fate is Livy’s mention that it was seized by the Aequi in 410 and subsequently changed hands more than once. Next year Verrugo was captured, and in spite of some vicissitudes it remained generally in Roman hands until its revolt in 394; and to this period also the occupation of Vitellia by a Roman colony may possibly be assigned. By these small gains the Aequi were thrust off the outskirts of the plain; and though the struggle still went on with varied fortunes, in 393 the invaders lost their hold on Tiburtine territory when they were ejected from Aeful-um (or -ae). Rome could now boast that from Tibur to the Alban hills Latium was protected by a belt of country in the uplands beyond the frontier whence the Aequi had finally been expelled.

The lands on the coast where the Volsci had settled were richer than the heights on which the Aequi appeared, and the efforts needed for their recovery were on a larger scale. The first recorded move was made from the Hernican region to the north, when the Volsci were turned out of Ferentinum in 431. Unless the fall of Verrugo should properly be mentioned here, the next attack was delivered from the Latin side along the coast. Anxur fell in 406 and was definitely in Latin hands by 400. Velitrae received a Roman garrison in 404; and by 393, when a colony was sent to Circeii, the people of Latium had won back almost everything in the coastal region that had been lost since the time of the second Tarquin. The fall of Antium is not recorded, though it is implied by the conquests on either side; and Satricum too, though we do not know when it was first recovered, was under Roman control when it rebelled in 393. Thus in a century or rather more Latium had retrieved the disasters which the Etruscan withdrawal had involved, and the Latin power, back once more in Tarracina (Anxur), was again almost within sight of the Liris and Campania.

VII.

THE CONQUEST OF SOUTHERN ETRURIA

The last phase in the external history of fifth-century Rome is the offensive movement on the Etruscan front which ended with the fall of Veii. On the opposite side of the Campagna Rome and the Latins had already made progress enough into Aequian and Volscian country to be secure against the danger of serious invasion from the south-east. Along the Tiber valley the capture of Fidenae—and of Crustumerium, if tradition is wrong in saying that Crustumerium was finally taken in the earliest days of the Republic—had deprived the Etruscans of their last hold on the left bank and had given the peoples of Latium the best of all bases for operations against the headquarters of the enemy—the city of Veii. And Rome herself, with a confidence intelligible after her success in the troubles of the recent past, seems to have been in a mood to make the most of her advantages. The advance against Aequi and Volsci may be regarded as no more than retaliation against unprovoked attacks. The move against Veii, on the other hand, was different. Veii, indeed, could not complain of unjustified aggression if war were carried into her own territory; but, for Rome, the campaign against Veii meant the opening of a new epoch in her history. When Rome crossed the Tiber and claimed something more than a bridge-head on the further bank, she abandoned her natural boundary to the north-west and entered a region whose limits in the end were found to lie far beyond the Monti Cimini which lay on the immediate sky-line.

The chronology of the Veientane war is a matter of some obscurity and small importance. On one point Diodorus and Livy, the two primary authorities, are agreed—that M. Furius Camillus was nominated dictator in 396 and brought the war to an end by capturing Veii in the same year. In spite of the elaborations to which the career of Camillus has been submitted, the date of his most memorable achievement may be accepted as approximately right. That Camillus was in command when Veii fell is a fact too well attested for doubt. As Beloch has observed1, it is unlikely that he became dictator before 403, when he held the office of tribunus militum consulari potestate for the first time; and it is certain that the Roman victory over Veii had been achieved before the Gallic incursion, which cannot be put later than 384, if it was not so early as 390. Thus the capture of Veii is appropriately placed between 403 and 386; and if Rome’s treaty with the Faliscans—a treaty certainly made after the Veientane war— is rightly assigned to the second consular tribunate of Camillus in 394, the lower limit for the fall of Veii may be fixed, as Beloch fixes it, in the latter year. Thus the familiar date for the conclusion of the war may be believed, with the admission of a possible error amounting at most to a year or two in one direction or the other. The duration of the war is less clear. According to Diodorus hostilities and the siege began together in 406; according to Livy negotiations opened in 407, when the peace of twenty years between Rome and Veii had either expired or at least was running out, but the siege itself was not begun till 406. Yet though these accounts are not hard to reconcile and though they are consistent with the versions of the preceding history to which they are attached, there remains a suspicion that the ten years duration of the first great siege in Roman history is derived from the accepted story of the first and most famous siege in the recorded history of Greece. The case against tradition is not strong enough to compel its rejection: but the possibility cannot be ignored that the chronology for the outbreak of war was reached by placing a ten years siege before the date accepted for the fall of Veii.

The details of Livy’s story are in large part an unprofitable study. Some of the less important features have clearly been produced by duplication; and others, though their origin is obscure, for other reasons are difficult to believe. Minor episodes in the operations may be ignored; but in the narrative of Livy certain major points demand attention. The brief account of Diodorus mentions only two incidents besides the opening and the close of the campaign. One is a successful sortie by the besieged in 402, which in Livy appears twice—in this year and in the year before: the other is the introduction of military pay at the beginning of the war. To this Livy adds another military reform—the first inclusion in the forces of Rome of equites mounted at their own expense. The value to be assigned to the suggestions of developments in the Roman army system during the Veientane war is discussed elsewhere in connection with the history of Roman institutions. Here it is enough to say that the introduction of pay and the first appearance of equites equo privato do not stand or fall together. An increase of the mounted troops is a change of small significance. The provision of pay, on the other hand, is a departure of the deepest meaning. It is the first step of many taken by Rome towards turning an army characteristic of a typical city-state into the army of an imperial people. A citizen-militia, whose members might reasonably be expected to serve for nothing, was enough to carry on the brief border warfare in which city-states were wont to settle their accounts: but the purposes of an empire called for longer and more continuous service than this. Longer service could only be had if the troops were paid; and there is much plausibility in the view of tradition that it was the protracted siege of Veii which first forced Rome to provide her soldiers with more regular and immediate recompense than a share of the booty when victory had been won.

Another feature of the story deserves notice for its reference to the only monument of the Roman triumph which survived, at least in part, to later times. Livy relates that in 398 the waters of the Alban Lake suddenly rose high above their normal level, and that Rome sent a mission to Delphi to ask the meaning of this manifestation. When the envoys returned they brought an oracle which confirmed the utterance made already in their absence by a Veientane seer—that Veii would not fall to Rome until Rome had built an outlet for the Lake. The emissarium was thereupon constructed, and when it was complete the forces of Camillus made their way into the citadel of Veii by a gallery bored underground. At the outset of the campaign of 396 Camillus had vowed a tithe of the booty to Delphi, and after the war was over the tithe was sent in the shape of a gold krater, which was first captured by the pirates of the Lipari Islands but finally reached Delphi, where it stood in the Treasury of the Massiliotes. The bowl itself was rifled by Onomarchus in the middle of the fourth century during the Sacred War, but the base remained; and since its original purpose was known, it may be assumed to have borne an inscription recording the origin and occasion of the offering which had disappeared. The tale of this dedication is found in several derivative authorities, but their testimony does nothing to confirm the account of Livy. Confirmation is, however, forthcoming from Diodorus; and since it seems that the base long survived, it can scarcely be doubted that Delphi could boast a memorial of the Veientane war.

For the circumstances which Livy narrates, no credence need be claimed. It is scarcely probable that a connection, even of time, existed between the capture of Veii and the emissarium of the Alban Lake. The physical features of the site make it improbable that a cuniculus played any part in the taking of the city, and it is certain that no trace of such a gallery has so far been found. Moreover, this method of entering a town through a mine is three times recorded of earlier Roman operations against Fidenae. Again, the oracle may be no more than a later invention designed to explain the offering of the krater; and similarly the story that the matrons of Rome were rewarded for their public spirit in surrendering their gold ornaments to provide metal for the dedication by the grant of permission to use carriages in Rome is probably an artificial explanation of the way in which the women had come to enjoy a right denied to men. Such elaborations are not surprising in a piece of history whose embellishment was not complete till the Augustan age. Livy himself seems to have been responsible for a final addition—the great speech in which Camillus, after the departure of the Gauls, is made to utter the sentiments which Livy shared with Vergil and Horace on a living issue in the early principate of Augustus. In word Camillus is resisting a proposal to transfer the Roman people and the Roman gods to the site of Veii; in fact his argument is directed against a plan—which public opinion had attributed to Julius and which Augustus was suspected of having inherited from him—to move at least the administrative centre of the Roman Empire to some city in the eastern Mediterranean.

But though many details of the narrative must be rejected as late, the Roman offering to Delphi stands on the solid foundation of the base which seems long to have survived in the Treasury of Massilia. If the offering may be accepted as historical, it deserves notice for several reasons. Not only does it lend support to other suggestions of friendship between Rome and the Massiliotes at least as early as the end of the fifth century, but it confirms in some degree the date for the introduction of the Apollo-cult at Rome which Livy indicates when he says that the first temple of which we hear was vowed in 433, and above all it throws a ray of welcome light on the nature of the relations which existed already by the time of the Gallic raid between Rome and the world of Hellas.

Of the remaining threads in the narrative only one need be followed with any care. From the beginning of the story there are scattered hints that the peril of Veii at length did something to break down the indifference of her neighbours. Livy tells how in 405 the federal council of the Etruscan cities considered the question of declaring a bellum publicum gentis universae against Rome, without, however, coming to a decision. Two years later, when the Veientanes appointed a king for the more effective conduct of the war, the council seized upon this as an excuse for officially proclaiming as its policy the attitude of indolent inaction which in fact it had adopted from the first, and to this policy the Etruscans adhered even when in 397, at the crisis of the struggle, a special appeal on behalf of Veii was made by the peoples of Capena and Falerii. Tarquinii alone among the great cities of Etruria made some attempt to hamper the Roman operations by a sudden raid on the territory of Rome in 397; but this, if it is historical at all, was a brief and futile effort.

The explanation of the Etruscan failure to grapple with a danger which threatened far more than the southern fringe of Etruria is something still to seek. Livy may possibly be right in hinting that the cities farther north were already fully occupied by the advent of the Gauls; but, as has often been observed, the Gauls will not account for the passivity of cities on the Tuscan coast, and it is these which might naturally have led a movement for the relief of Veii. Tarquinii may indeed have done a little; but Caere was Veii’s nearest neighbour, and the attitude of Caere, if one may argue from Livy’s suggestion that Roman forces enjoyed free passage across Caeretan country and from Caere’s behaviour at the time of the Gallic raid, was one of actual hostility to the besieged. So far as our evidence indicates any conclusion at all, the conclusion must be that the Etruscans left Veii to its fate through that petty jealousy which seems always to have been Etruria’s curse; and in the Veientane war the land immediately at stake was an outlying district south of the Monti Cimini geographically separated from the rest of Etruria by a division so distinct that the risk of a Roman advance farther north may well have seemed too remote to outweigh the temptations of self interest. Livy’s story of the decisions taken at the fanum Voltumnae may not be strictly true: it is possible that at this time the Etruscan synod was not concerned with political affairs at all. But even if this be so, and if it be regarded as absurd to hold that a religious meeting of representatives from the Etruscan cities might make an appropriate opportunity for broaching a proposal for common action in an affair of common interest, the account which Livy gives of the spirit prevailing in Etruria is probably not far from fair.

In another quarter Veii sought help with more success. According to Livy, the cities of Capena and Falerii, of which the latter at least was strong enough to be an ally of the greatest value, intervened in 402; and from that year onwards they maintained an almost uninterrupted activity until, when Veii fell, they were still in arms and found themselves obliged to settle a heavy account with Rome as best they might. The Faliscans, with a foresight not vouchsafed to the peoples of Etruria to the north, had recognized the Roman peril even before Fidenae collapsed. To Fidenae their help had been unavailing, but in 402 it was transferred to Veii. In that year, together with the Capenates, they were victorious in a raid of some dimensions; and though their territory was ravaged by Rome in 401, they were in the field again by 399. This time they were defeated; but even when their appeal to the Etruscan council had failed in 397 they were still able to strike another blow for Veii in the year in which it fell. After the power of Veii had been broken, the resistance of Capena and Falerii was overcome with ease: Capena made terms in 395 and Falerii in 394.

Rome was thus left with a broad tract of land at her disposal on the right bank of the Tiber, and the way in which this land was treated is a matter of some obscurity. The outstanding feature of the settlement, which does not seem to have been made until the Gallic incursion had been repelled, was the creation of four new rustic tribes on the ager Veiens. To the seventeen already in existence there were added the tribus Stellatina, Tromentina, Sabatina and Arnensis. But, though this much is clear, the precise extent of the country thus annexed by Rome is doubtful. If there were evidence enough to show that Capena was included in the tribus Stellatina from its formation, as it certainly came to be in later times, the territory of Capena as well as that of Veii would have to be reckoned among the immediate acquisitions of Rome. Festus, however, does not prove the point, and the suggestions of his mutilated text are too vague to be set against the authority of Livy. Since Falerii survived to fight two more wars with Rome, Livy’s account cannot be questioned when he says that in 394 Rome made no more than a treaty with the Faliscans: and if in this instance Livy’s narrative is sound, it may well be right again when it records a similar treaty between Rome and Capena in 395.

Nevertheless, whatever the view about Rome’s treatment of Capena which Festus may at one time have preserved, it is not to be denied that the story of Rome’s early dealings with the peoples of southern Etruria is open to some suspicion of corrupt anticipations. Two of the twelve Latin colonies which in 209 BC declared themselves unable to continue the supply of men and money to Rome were Sutrium and Nepete. That Rome came into contact with these cities soon after the end of the Veientane war is obvious; for their boundaries on the south-west must have marched at least for some distance with those of Veii. There is nothing improbable in the tale of Diodorus, unintelligible though it is without emendation, that Sutrium somehow engaged Roman attention in 394; but Diodorus is less convincing when he refers to it as a colony in 390. Livy mentions the colonization of Nepete in 383, and this is placed by Velleius in 373 with Sutrium ten years earlier1. Before this, however—in 389 and 386—Livy calls the people of both cities socii populi Romani. The plausible arguments of Beloch2 do not prove his view that neither of these places became a Latin colony before the fifties of the fourth century; but they at least may serve as a reminder of reasons, among which geographical considerations perhaps carry the greatest weight, for doubting the version which holds that Sutrium and Nepete received their later status within a few years of Veii’s fall. It may be admitted that with them, as with Falerii and Capena, Rome made some kind of treaty forthwith; but in the culminating episode of the period with which this chapter deals the actual gain which accrued to the ager Romanus across the Tiber was probably confined to the territory of Veii itself.

Thus in Etruria Rome stood facing Caere and Falerii; and her next step northward only comes with the period after the Gallic raid. At this point all that remains is to survey the results achieved by Rome between the expulsion of the kings and the fall of Veii. For more than half of the fifth century Rome had been on the defensive, and for that reason her territorial gains had not been commensurate with her efforts. Land had been annexed on the Algidus and in Etruria, but even so the ager Romanus had not increased to more than 650 square miles. Against this the cities of the Latin League, which had profited greatly by the foundation of colonies along the coast on land recovered when the Volscian thrust was repelled, could set a thousand square miles or more. Yet, despite the superiority of the acreage they could boast, the Latins were so far from having strengthened their hands against Rome that the fifth century may justly be said to have sealed the doom of the Latin League. Just as the peoples of the Latin plain had owed much in the fight with the invaders of the fifth century to the continuity of their territory and to its central position, so in the domestic affairs of Latium it was to the great advantage of Rome that the ager Romanus was an unbroken block of country round whose fringes the members of the League lay scattered. Notwithstanding its extent, after the advance made by Rome into the Aequian country, the League was geographically so badly placed that strong and united action seems to have become impossible. On the north the towns round Tibur were cut off from the rest by the strip of country about the Algidus which Rome had annexed. Tusculum was wholly surrounded by Rome, except on the north where her lands bordered for a few miles on those of Gabii. The great cities between Aricia and the coast had no access of their own to their fellows farther north; and places like Signia, Cora and Norba were mere outposts round the Monti Lepini—garrisons face to face with the Volscians and denied their natural communications with the main body of the League by the resolute refusal of Praeneste to become a member. The League thus lacked cohesion, and the result appears already in the fifth century. The equal alliance between Rome and the Latins collapsed: the arrangements for alternate Roman and Latin command of the allied forces were disregarded: and in affairs which affected the common interests of the region the initiative lay with Rome. The time had not, indeed, arrived for the formal extension of Rome’s authority over Latium as a whole; but when Rome was called upon to face the coming of the Gauls she could claim already to have gained effective hegemony of western Italy from the frontiers of Caere and the Monti Cimini in the north to Cape Circello and Tarracina in the south.

CHAPTER XVI

THE MAKING OF A UNITED STATE