015a - The Second Samnite War

Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome. The Romans enjoyed ten years of peace after the end of the Latin War in 338 BC, and spent the years quietly expanding their territory. This decade saw the emergence of a new attitude towards territorial expansion. It was no longer enough to merely ensure the survival of Rome by controlling Latium and fending off intruders. The Romans now sought to spread their influence over a much wider geographic area in order to draw taxes and manpower from a wider pool of citizens. No one power had controlled the entire Italian peninsula before, but the Romans started to think that maybe they could pull it off. They essentially looked around Italy, sized up the competition, liked their odds, and went for it.

The Samnites were A number one on the list of potential threats, and the Romans knew that if they were able to conquer the powerful hill tribe, nothing would stand in their way of conquering all of Italy. However, the Romans were loath to simply expand, that would be immoral. The Romans only engaged in just wars when they or one of their allies was threatened. They would never declare a war unprovoked, it was considered barbaric, so they set about needling the Samnites into attacking first so Rome could enter the war it wanted honorably. They dispatched citizens to form a colony in Samnite territory, figuring the Samnites would either let them get away with it and the Romans would have gained more land without drawing swords, or the Samnites would attack and the Romans would come to the rescue of their besieged citizens. Things did not go exactly by Roman design, but in the end they did get their war.

The Samnites were caught up at the time fighting the Greeks in the south and could not immediately respond to the Roman settlement, so the Romans, emboldened, set up another. When the Samnites concluded their war with the Greeks, they did turn west, but it was not to directly engage the Roman colonies. Rather they moved on the Greek city of Neopolis, which is present day Naples, forging an agreement with its citizens to aid their dream of expanding off the coast and into greater Campania. The nobility of Neopolis, however, dismayed at the Samnite garrison and the loss of control over their own city, turned to Rome for assistance. It was the call Rome was looking for, but it was something of a letdown. Fighting the Samnites in Campania would not garner them any more land if they won, which was the whole point of provoking the Samnites, but, reluctant to pass up the opportunity, they agreed to help the Neapolitan nobility and drive off the Samnite garrison, which they did, sparking the Second Samnite War in 327 BC.

The early momentum was clearly in Roman hands. Samnite allies were peeled off and the Romans won victory after victory on the battlefield. In fact, the only major defeat for the Romans in these early years came as a result not of Samnite strength, but of a psychological mutiny by the Roman army against their own commander, the result of an extended melodrama which is too juicy for me to not relate in detail.

In 325 BC, as would be the case in many of these years, a dictator, Lucius Papirius Cursor, was appointed to oversee the war effort, and Quintus Fabius Maximus, the grandfather of the more famous Fabius Maximus, who saw Rome through the early disastrous years of the Second Punic War, was named his master of horse. They set out for Samnium, but the taking of the auspices, a critical superstitious step for all Roman endeavors, had been done poorly or was messed up or showed ill omens. Whatever was wrong, Papirius decided to head back to Rome and retake them in an attempt to secure a favorable sign from the gods. He very clearly ordered Fabius not to engage the Samnites while he was gone, but Fabius, being young, could not help himself.

The Samnites, knowing the Roman commander was away, were relaxed, believing no battle imminent. Fabius, on his own initiative, decided that it would be a perfect time for a sneak attack. He ordered the army out, routing the surprised Samnites easily, and captured their camp along with a great deal of plunder. When Papirius returned, however, he was enraged, red in the face, screaming and cursing enraged. How could Fabius have so clearly disobeyed him when the whole purpose for leaving was to align Roman interests with the gods' favor? By attacking before securing favorable auspices, Fabius endangered not just the army, but Rome as a whole. Then, singing the praises of Manlius, who, you will recall, executed his own son for disobedience, Papirius ordered Fabius arrested.

The army was incredulous. They had just won an easy victory thanks to Fabius' decisive action, and now Papirius wanted to punish him? It was absurd. The general feeling was that Papirius was simply jealous for missing out on the glory. Despite entreaties from the officers, however, Papirius insisted on Fabius' arrest. A slow-moving riot began to build, which was cut off only by nightfall, and during the night Fabius, understanding that Papirius had every intention of executing him the next morning, escaped from the camp and made for Rome with all haste.

Upon reaching the city, Fabius and his father, who had previously been consul and was a man of high standing, went before the senate to plead the young man's case. Papirius showed up, and the scene from the camp was repeated. Papirius was a towering inferno of rage. He railed against Fabius' disobedience and sacrilege, and pointed to the irreparable harm the boy had done to army discipline and the moral fiber of the state itself. There was nothing untrue about what Papirius said, but the senate pleaded with him to go easy on Fabius. He was a popular young noble, and, after all, had just won a great victory. Wasn't Papirius taking this all just a bit too far? By this point Papirius was getting shrill, and I can't help but picture the senators looking sideways at each other as he launched into another red-faced harangue, and thinking, "'Jeez, man, lighten up!' In the end, when it became clear that absolutely no one supported him, Papirius attempted to salvage some dignity, not just for himself, but for the office of dictator which was in danger of becoming irrelevant. He agreed to lift the sentence of death and content himself with stripping Fabius of his power and leaving him behind in Rome.

Returning to the army, Papirius ordered his troops to pursue and engage the reformed Samnite army, but this time, instead of an easy victory, the Samnites managed to get the upper hand. The Roman soldiers, who loved Fabius and hated Papirius, had no intention of letting the dictator win any battles, so they, in effect, threw the fight. Papirius, though, did not ride off into the history books as a shrill and overbearing failure, and to his credit he saw the error of his ways. He had come down too harshly on Fabius, and in doing so had lost the support of his troops. So he spent the next few days endearing himself to them, visiting the wounded and treading lightly with his discipline. He won back the favor of the men, and when he ordered them out to fight the next time, they did not disappoint and delivered to him the victory that he sought. Over the course of the war, Papirius would serve his consul four times, and when he finally did ride off into the history books, he was remembered as a great commander and one of the best men of his generation.

After Papirius's victory, the Samnites sued for peace, but the Roman senate demanded such lopsided terms that the Samnites could not accept and the war continued. It would prove to be a mistake of the highest order, because the Romans were about to walk into one of their greatest and arguably most humiliating defeats in their history. At least at Cannae, the Roman army was beaten in the field, but Caudine Forks ended with the Romans so completely outmaneuvered that their army never drew their swords before offering them to the Samnites in surrender. Many saw it as punishment for the hubris Rome had shown towards the Samnite peace envoys.

The defeat at Caudine Forks, however, just as the defeat of Cannae would a century later, did nothing less than prove that the Romans were cut from a completely different cloth than their contemporaries. Any other state, when faced with such catastrophic defeats, would have quit and prayed for mercy from their enemies, but the Romans never even gave it a thought. They never quit, they just kept coming.

At Caudine Forks, the Romans were set up perfectly by the Samnite commander Gaius Pontius. He dispatched some of his soldiers into Roman territory masquerading as non-combatant herdsmen. When they inevitably fell into the hands of Roman patrols, they all told the same story to their captors. The full force of the Samnite army was besieging the city of Lucaria, a Roman ally. The Romans, hearing this information repeated from multiple sources, bought the story hook, line, and sinker. They sent both consuls with their armies to aid Lucaria, but, of course, the Samnites were nowhere near Lucaria. They were stationed near Caudium, specifically at the pass where the Romans would have to travel to get to Lucaria.

Called the Caudine Forks, the pass started very narrow, then opened into a wide plain, and then became very narrow again on the way out. On either side, steep peaks prevented any movement besides forward and backward. The consuls led their army hastily into the pass, believing all the danger to lie ahead. But when they reached the other side of the flat plain, they found their exit blocked off by a pile of boulders. Sensing that something was amiss, the consuls immediately ordered a retreat, but by this time it was too late. The Samnites had already blockaded the other end as well. The Roman army was trapped and in a hopeless position.

Soldiers joked darkly about their pointless labor as the consuls ordered them to build a fortified camp. There was no getting out and there would be no attack to repel. The Samnites would simply wait the requisite three days for them to run out of food and demand surrender. The consuls and their officers recognized the immensity of their blunder as they tossed around impossible to execute escape plans.

The next morning Pontius sent for his father, who, though retired, was a great military strategist and asked for the old man's advice about what to do with the trapped Romans. At first his father sent word that Pontius should let the army walk away unharmed. Unsure of the message, for it seemed a crazy notion, Pontius sent for clarification, and when word came again, the message had changed. It now read, Kill them all, down to the last man. This sounded more like his father, but Pontius was confused and unsure whether the old man had slipped into senility. Hadn't he just said to let them all go? So he sent for his father and asked him to join him at Caudium.

When the old man arrived, he told his son that he still retained his senses and neither message had been a mistake. The best option, by far, he said, was to spare the army and return them unharmed to Rome, for in doing so they would win the internal friendship and gratitude of the Roman people and hostilities would end forever. The second best option was to kill them all and end hostilities for at least a generation by decimating Rome's available manpower and filling the Roman populace with terror of the Samnites. There are no other options, the old man said, extreme generosity or extreme cruelty. That was it. But Pontius was unnerved by both and settled on a third option that his father warned him, correctly, would win him no friends and eliminate no enemies.

He would let the army go, but force them to surrender under the yoke, a humiliating ritual in which the defeated army must pass beneath a horizontal spear lashed to two vertical spears, creating a gate of sorts that the soldiers had to stoop to pass beneath. To the honor-crazed armies of the ancient world, this humiliation was far worse than being killed on the battlefield, far, far worse. And to the men who surrendered at Caudium, their humiliation would be doubled because they had never even drawn their swords. They were never given the opportunity to die gloriously in battle and take as many Samnites as they could with them. It was absolutely unheard of to give up without a fight, and the thought of it mortally offended every soldier in the army, but their orders were clear and pass under the yoke they did.

The army that marched back to Rome was unlike any that had gone before it or would come after. They marched weaponless and in complete silence, walking and eating without saying a word or even looking up from the ground. Some said that the Samnites had defeated the spirit of Rome itself, but savvy observers warned that this was unlikely, that the silent army was not devoid of spirit, but merely smoldering with such an intense rage that words could not express their emotions. And woe to those upon whom Rome's fury would be unleashed!

The terms of the peace also called for six hundred cavalrymen, i.e., the sons of the richest men in Rome, to be held as hostages, as well as for the consuls and their officers to become guarantors of the peace, an official, half-religious, half-legal position in ancient international diplomacy. In effect, it meant that upon their return to Rome they must force the senate and people to accept the terms of peace offered at the battlefield. If they did not, the gods would punish Rome as a whole if the guarantors who were in breach of their duty did not hand themselves back over to the Samnites, who would sell them as slaves. This threat was supposed to be enough to compel even unhappy guarantors to do their duty, and it usually was, but, like I say, the Romans were cut from a completely different cloth.

It is unclear at what point Postumius, one of the consuls, decided to breach the trust, whether it was his plan all along, or whether he decided to do so after reaching Rome. But when he stood before the senate and delivered the official account of events leading up to the surrender and the terms of the peace, he urged them not to accept, but reject the Samnites' offer and immediately re-raise the army and attack. He and his colleagues had been foolish, but that did not mean Rome itself should admit defeat. Further, he said, he and his officers would immediately march back to where Pontius waited for word and surrender themselves, releasing Rome from its obligation to honor the terms of the treaty.

The senate, who had been ready to castigate Postumius and his colleague in the harshest terms, now praised them to the heavens. The two consuls and their officers, a priest in tow to witness the whole thing, returned to the Samnite army and surrendered themselves, announcing that Rome rejected peace and did so with the full favor of the gods. Pontius was incensed and refused to accept the surrender, claiming that the sneaky Romans were just trying to weasel their way out of defeat with a legalistic reading of the pact. No one who swore to be a guarantor abandoned his duty and thought that just by surrendering himself he had absolved his nation of guilt. It was outrageous! But there Postumius stood doing exactly that. If Rome wanted to play chicken with the gods, that was fine with Pontius, and ordered his men to let Postumius and his officers walk away unmolested, so the offer of surrender would never be accepted and the pact, at least from the Samnite perspective, would remain in breach.

How much of this story is propaganda and how much is true is up in the air. There is no doubt, though, that following the defeat at the Caudine Forks, there was a five-year lull in hostilities. It seems reasonable that the five years of peace was somehow related to the terms of the surrender, but according to the Romans, they never recognized any peace and were free and clear to continue fighting if they wished. I suspect that the story of Postumius' surrender is overblown. It mirrors closely a story from the First Punic War in which a captured general is returned to Rome to secure a peace treaty, but instead tells the Senate to keep fighting and then honorably returns to Carthage, where the promise of torture and death await him.

But even if the Romans had believed they could keep fighting, unbound by any treaty, that did not mean that they would necessarily have wanted to. Caudine Forks had been a humiliation, that much is certain, and the Romans would have had no interest in allowing history to repeat itself. Perhaps the five-year layoff was simply Rome being cautious. Clearly the Samnites were more clever than they had been given credit for. There was no sense in giving them the opportunity to crush Rome's dreams of empire so soon after they had been fully, consciously articulated. The Romans would buy their time, patience was another great Roman virtue. They were in no hurry, they just wanted to be sure of victory.

Most likely, though, a five-year peace was forced on the Romans, who had no choice but to submit to the Samnite terms, and no such episode of bold defiance ever occurred.

Next week we will pick up when hostilities begin again, around 315 BC. At that point the Etruscans in the north and the Greeks in the south would both become involved as well, leading the fight between the Romans and Samnites to become a struggle that embroiled all the major powers in Italy.