015b - The Second Samnite War
Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome. The Romans licked their wounds, or perhaps more accurately, nursed their egos, after the defeat at Caudine Forks in 321 BC. Five years passed with the Romans engaging their neighbors in minor skirmishes, but avoiding another major confrontation with the Samnites. Whether this was because of an official peace treaty, or out of Roman fear, is still unclear, but whatever the cause, there was a break in the fighting. All that changed in 316 BC, however, when the Romans, confident once again, marched out and attempted again to conquer the Samnites. This second stage of the war started out no better for the Romans than the first had ended, though. But they soon gained the upper hand, and after ten years of hard fighting, the Romans would force the Samnites to submit in 304 BC.
In the race to victory, the Romans stumbled out of the gates. In 315 BC, they met the Samnites near Laudelay, and were defeated in convincing fashion. Details of the battle are sketchy, but it appears certain that the dictator commanding the Roman legion was killed in the fighting. Rome's power was now on the verge of completely unraveling. They had lost a major battle at Caudine without a fight, and now, on their big comeback tour, when they actually took the field against the Samnites, they were soundly beaten. Things were not looking good for the Romans. Campania, the territory over which Rome and Samnium had originally clashed, was perilously close to abandoning their treaty with Rome, so recently entered into, and giving themselves over to the Samnites. Terentum, a major Greek city in the south, had already declared for the Samnites, and now negotiations had begun to bring the Etruscans into the fray. However, the Etruscans bought high on Samnite power, and, when they did enter the war, found themselves overmatched by a newly resurgent Rome.
It was during these years that the Romans began to radically alter the legion's organization and tactics, switching from the clunky phalanx into the maneuverable three-line maniple system. Once the structural deficiencies of their army were ironed out, Rome's advantage in wealth and manpower left little doubt as to the final outcome of the war. One of the ways that wealth manifested itself as an aid to the war effort was in an infrastructure project that survives today, a living monument to Roman engineering genius, the Via Appia, or Appian Way. During the First Samnite War, though they emerged victorious, the Romans struggled constantly to move troops and supplies south into Campania and Samnium in anything resembling quick time. Wet, marshy land separated the two points, literally bogging down efforts. Roads through the foothills above were too hazardous, and the only other route was a long, arduous trip along the coast. The Romans needed a way to get into Campania quickly, and began to entertain the idea of building a straight road linking Rome and Capua, the capital city of Campania. But proposals never got off the ground, as resources were tied up first with the Latin War, then again with the Samnites, but in 312 BC, a man came forward with the vision and will to accomplish the goal.
Appius Claudius, whose name was attached to the road for his efforts, was a member in good standing of one of the more controversial families in Rome, the Claudii. Implacable foes of the Populians, the Claudii never lacked for enemies. Indeed, it had been another Appius Claudius who had headed the Decemviri in its efforts to consolidate power after compiling the Twelve Tables of Law around 450 BC. But the Appius Claudius of whom we speak today outdid them all in pomposity and pretensions to infallibility. He remains himself one of the more interesting and infamous figures in Roman history, both the driving force behind some of the most ambitious public works projects in history, and a man who seemed coolly untroubled by his own thrashing of constitutional and religious precedents.
Claudius was elected censor, an office of enormous importance, in 312 BC, along with a colleague. One of the critical functions of the censors at this point was to declare who was eligible for the Senate and who was eligible to vote. Claudius, rather than simply following the previous year's rules, as was the custom, decided to drastically alter the composition of the Senate and the electorate, expelling members he considered his enemies and enrolling men who promised him loyalty. Aghast, his colleague resigned, knowing that if he did so, Claudius would be stopped because any time one censor died or resigned, the other stepped down so two fresh censors could stand in their place. But Claudius refused to step down, sparking a minor constitutional crisis. The manipulated Senate, however, made of senators who owed their office to Claudius, predictably remained silent. Despite calls for his head, Claudius remained in office.
He then further infuriated public opinion by taking certain sacred rights away from a family he disapproved of and passing them into the hands of public slaves. For this offense, Claudius was allegedly struck blind by the gods, though accounts of his eyesight loss do not crop up until later in the annals, and then seem to only describe his final days as old blind Claudius, declaring Rome's determined opposition to Pyrrhus' invasion. In any event, blind or not, Claudius set to work on his pet projects, two of which stood foremost in his mind, the road to Capua, which would bear his name, and a series of aqueducts that would guarantee a fresh water supply for Rome, which would also bear his name.
The Romans had finally accepted Claudius as single censor, and even applauded his lead in the public works, but he set off a fresh firestorm when his term of office expired after eighteen months. He shocked everyone by declaring that he would not be stepping down. Rome was aghast at this sacrilege. He had sworn an oath to step down, and now flouted it with all the hubris of a Greek tragic hero. In the end, Claudius would remain censor for five unprecedented years, generally upsetting constitutional purists, but endearing himself to the people with his liberal dispensations from the treasury, the obvious benefits of his projects, and his policies of enfranchisement, for he extended the vote to landless citizens who otherwise had no voice at all. He proved sufficiently popular that when he stepped down, he immediately won election as consul.
In later years, the scandals of Appius Claudius were largely forgotten, and he was remembered first and foremost as the man who gave the Romans their most important road and their most important network of aqueducts. The Appian Way, after it had served its immediate military purpose, would evolve into the main artery of travel and trade for the Romans, eventually stretching over five hundred miles southeast across the peninsula. Equipped with their new road, made of stone, bowed to prevent water collection, and supported by retaining walls, the Romans were now able to keep their troops in Samnium, far better supplied than before, and the war began to slowly turn against the Samnites.
The Roman strategy was straightforward, though it took years to see it through to the end. The Samnites, unlike their neighbors in the lowlands, did not concentrate in large cities, and as a result, there was no one place the Romans could target to bring a swift conclusion to hostilities. They had to proceed piecemeal, cutting off Samnite communities from each other by holding the mountain passes and building fortresses along navigable rivers. Once an area was secure, the Romans could move on, at all times doing their best to cut off supply routes and access to summer or winter pasture land, and so disrupt the entire Samnite way of life. In this way the Romans slowly hemmed in the Samnites, and annexed more and more of their territory, sending in colonists and taking possession of Samnium bit by little bit.
The Samnites, however, were not the only enemy the Romans now faced. The Etruscans, mustering what solidarity they could, rose up in arms in 311 BC and opened a whole new theater of operations. Each year the Romans designated one of their consuls to handle operations in Samnium, while the other went north to Etruria. It speaks volumes of the manpower and wealth available to Rome that they were able to run wars on two completely separate fronts and emerge victorious from both. The Romans were in the driver's seat for most of the decade, with the Senate truly gripped by panic only once, in 310 BC, and even then it was a panic from a lack of information rather than from any true danger.
In the north, the consul in charge, the former insubordinate master of Horus Quintus Fabius, went off the radar for a while. He had defeated an Etruscan army, and the survivors had fled into the Cominian forest, a dense, roadless wooded area which was off limits to the superstitious Romans. But Fabius decided reports about rodents of unusual side lurking in the forest were overblown and took his army in, pursuing the fleeing Etruscan army. He was out of contact for some time, which would have been a cause for concern but not alarm, had not his colleague Insamnium been wounded in battle at the same time. The Senate, back in Rome, received word that one consul was injured, who knew how badly, and the other had led his army into the nightmare woods of the Cominian forest and began to panic.
In point of fact, the consul Insamnium recovered from his minor injuries quickly, and Quintus Fabius was actually in the process of securing an alliance with the people who dwelled inside the Cominian, but the Senate knew none of this. Papirius Cursor, the man who had ordered the execution of young Fabius, was appointed dictator by the panicky Senate and led an army of fresh recruits into Etruria to track down the lost legions. When he arrived, Fabius had already emerged from the woods, new allies in tow. He was surprised and horrified to find that his command had been given to Papirius, whom he understandably bore some resentment over the drama a few years earlier, but he submitted to the Senate's will and allowed Papirius to take command.
Together they led their combined army against the regrouped Etruscans near Lake Vadimo. The resulting battle was the only clash with the Etruscans that was ever in doubt. All three Roman lines became involved and the tide did not turn until late in the day. The Etruscans, however, eventually broke and fled. They never again caused the Romans serious trouble, surrendering in 308 BC, leaving the Samnites to carry on alone.
The Samnites were now in desperate straits. They were having difficulty with their supply lines, their armies could not link up with one another, they were constantly outnumbered, and their communities were beginning to suffer terribly under what was, in essence, a massive siege, not of a city, but of an entire territory. The Samnites held on as long as they could but finally, reluctantly, sued for peace in 304 BC, bringing an end to the Second Samnite War. They had lost a great deal of their territory and the Romans had founded 13 colonies in and around Samnium. In the north, the Romans had pushed deep into Etruscan territory and, either controlled by arms or alliance, most of what had once been the most powerful confederation in Italy. Roman garrison settled in across the peninsula, leaving only the Greek-controlled south untouched by Roman power.
The Second Samnite War had been an incredibly transformative period of time. Italy had gone from being a land of fractured and competing sovereigns to a land under the control of a single dominant power. Roman citizenship was extended in its various gradient forms to tribes across the peninsula, who recognized more and more that their future prosperity would be determined by their relationship with Rome. And though the Romans were of course resisted, and at this point their domination was by no means complete, as many as fought simply acquiesced and welcomed the Romans with open arms. As I noted previously, the Romans treated those who submitted without a fight with amazing generosity, giving them full access to Roman prosperity. Though they gave up their sovereignty and were required to submit soldiers for the legions, they received their fair share of the spoils and were allowed, as was standard Roman practice, a great deal of latitude in their own local rule.
The Romans themselves also changed. Obviously the makeup of the legions was now radically different than it had been, with its strategy, tactics, and organization completely overhauled. But the completion of the Appian Way and the aqueducts, so impressive in their scope and so well conceived in their construction, that it signaled a change in the Romans as a whole, as they began to outpace their contemporaries in terms of their level of civilization. Rome, in short, was becoming the Rome we think of and remember today. The Rome that keeps us fascinated 1,500 years after the fall of their empire.
The Samnites, however, were not done yet. After ten years of peace, they realized that any treaty with Rome meant effectively an end to their independence forever. Rome was moving inexorably in the direction of imperial master, not simply powerful neighbor. In a last, desperate play for general Italian independence, the Samnites organized and led a coalition that included the Etruscans, the Umbrians, and even the Gauls against Roman power. Next week, we will cover the resulting conflict, known as the Third Samnite War, though the name is a bit of a misnomer. It was not simply Rome against the Samnites, but Rome against everyone. And in this war against everyone, Rome would win and everyone else would lose.