The peace, however, did not last so much as five years, the nature of its conditions rendering this impossible. The Samnite war was followed by the reduction of the Æquians, who were still attached to their independence. The Romans, by a short but fierce war, forced them into a union with their own state. As the Æquians dwelt in villages built on hills, they were not so easy to be got at; and in consequence they received the right of Roman citizenship under favourable conditions. Hereupon the Romans established a colony at Carseoli in the country of the Æquians, and another at Alba on the lake Fucinus; the former was meant against Samnium, the latter revealed to the Marsians and to the other northern cantons the secret, that they also were to become subjects of the Romans. All the passes which lead through the Apennines, were now shut up. The Marsians rose; but peace was very soon concluded: the Romans wisely granted them very favourable conditions, by which that warlike nation was entirely gained over, and became one of the most faithful of allies. This happened in the year 451.
THE ETRUSCAN WAR. OTHER EVENTS DOWN TO THE THIRD SAMNITE WAR.
In the meanwhile, the Etruscan war had broken out in the year 444. A distinguishing characteristic of the Etruscans is the good faith with which they observed truces; and to this quality it must be attributed that the people of Tarquinii did not take any advantage of the circumstances of the Samnite war. Yet the victory of the Samnites near Lautulæ seems to have given them the first impulse. The union of the Etruscan towns was hard to accomplish; for at that time, not to speak of Cære, which had concluded peace for a hundred years, there were nine states which had to take that common step, although their interests were quite different.[145] The people of Tarquinii, for instance, had nothing to fear from the Gauls; but other states were threatened by them. When they were still considering, the tables had already turned, victory having in the meanwhile come back again to the Romans,—one reason more for the Etruscans to begin the war. Thus in 442, the Romans already looked upon an Etruscan war as unavoidable, and therefore appointed a dictator: yet the preparations of the Etruscans took up so much time that the whole of the following year passed away very quietly. It was only in the second year, that they commenced hostilities; but they found the Romans prepared. Their army was, however, considerable; and they acted on the offensive, a power which they may have acquired in their fierce wars with the Gauls. The Romans sent Q. Æmilius to Etruria, as the Etruscans were besieging the Roman border fortress Sutrium. The mountains of Viterbo had since the Gallic war been the frontier towards Etruria: they are now a bare ridge of hills; they were then covered with a thick forest. This is the Silva Ciminia of which Livy gives such a romantic description. It was nothing but the natural barrier between two nations which were unfriendly, and did not wish to have much intercourse: such a border may purposely be allowed to be overgrown with wood, and to become a wilderness. Such is the boundary between Austrian Croatia and Bosnia, where, since the memory of man, the wood has been left to itself, except that there are some wretched roads in it here and there. This forest was by no means on the scale of a Silva Hercynia, to which Livy likens it; but according to his own account, just broad enough for the Romans to take about a couple of hours to march through it. Sutrium and Nepete were the real border strongholds of the Romans; but always against Vulsinii, not against Tarquinii and Falerii: there the country was quite open, and had intercourse with Rome. The Roman consul now made his appearance to relieve Sutrium. Livy gives a very lively description of the battle; we see from him, that the Romans long kept back their strong reserve. This they often did to the very latest moment, allowing the troops engaged to shed their blood to the last drop: by this means, they gained many a victory. Thus it happened also this time: after having fought the whole day with the Etruscans, they conquered in the evening by bringing up the reserve. Livy says that in this battle the Etruscans had more men killed, while the Romans had the greater number of wounded; the reason of which is this, that the Romans fought with the pilum and the sword, but the Etruscans, who were armed after the Greek fashion, used the lance: these had also a large body of light troops. Even if we should listen to this account of Livy, we cannot believe in the result, that the Etruscans had been completely beaten; as in the following year, they were still encamped before Sutrium, and Fabius came forth to its relief. As their army was very great, Fabius thought it hazardous, as well as unnecessary, to attack them; for in truth, bold as the Romans were, on the whole, they were rather circumspect: they did not like to open a campaign with a battle.
Livy’s description of these wars is an immense exaggeration, which is the more to be wondered at, as his other histories of the Fabian house are so very exact. Fabius Pictor wrote not more than a hundred years after these events; and he is such an excellent writer, that we cannot lay the blame to him. There can be no doubt that Fabius was followed by Diodorus, whose account is here quite plain and credible, and not in any way to be reconciled with that of Livy: from whom the latter has taken his, heaven knows. According to Livy, the Etruscans in three battles must have lost a hundred thousand men; and not to speak of numbers at all, his description of the siege of Sutrium is quite incredible. Perhaps the only foundation there is for the first battle of Fabius in Livy, is, that by a very clever march he threw Roman troops and provisions into Sutrium. But when the Etruscans did not even then raise the siege, Fabius conceived the plan, which seemed foolhardy in the Romans, of invading Etruria itself across the Ciminian forest. The announcement of it spread terror in Rome. It seemed inevitable that the army would get between two Etruscan hosts; the Etruscans of Sutrium might cut off its direct retreat, and their return was only possible by going a great way round through Umbria, which was likewise a difficult country to pass. The senate deemed the undertaking so hazardous, that they sent five delegates, and two tribunes of the people, to dissuade him from it;—the tribunes accompanied the delegates, evidently to arrest him, if he should refuse to obey;—but Fabius had started in all haste, and, when the commissioners reached him, he already stood a conqueror in the midst of Etruria, just like Prince Eugene, by whom the order not to fight was read after the battle. Fabius in fact had pushed his army in advance, but had himself remained behind with the cavalry; then, leaving his camp standing, he undertook a great reconnoitring, and by this deceived the Etruscans during the day; towards sunset, he now followed his army and unexpectedly crossed the mountain. According to Diodorus, if we adopt the right reading,[146] Fabius, on the contrary, had invaded Etruria by going all the way round through Umbria, and had thus taken the Etruscans in the rear: in that case, the march across the Ciminian forest would be pure invention.
In this rich country, the Romans had their lust of plunder sated to the full, no enemy having been there for a hundred years, not even the Gauls. The Etruscans now raised the siege of Sutrium, and marched to Perusia, where Fabius won a decisive battle against them. Perusia, Cortona, and Arretium immediately negociated, making peace for a term of years: thus the western towns, Tarquinii, Vulsinii, Volaterræ, were left to themselves, and they tried to get a treaty on tolerable conditions.[147] The Romans did not perhaps wish to enter into a formal peace: on both sides, they were well pleased to drag on from year to year with the help of armistices. Vulsinii alone held out for thirty years, always drawing in single towns along with it; but the war was constantly interrupted by truces. At Vulsinii, the clients had gained a voice in the government: but the proud Vulsinians afterwards wished, by a counter revolution, to bring back the new Plebes to their old state of dependence; and as they did not succeed, they chose rather to let their city be destroyed by the Romans, than to share its honours with their former vassals. It was by raising their subjects, that they had been enabled to resist so long, whilst the other places, which were much better off, had already yielded in the first campaign: these had an enemy in their own subjects.[148]
The Romans had begun to form connexions also with Umbria; they had concluded a treaty with Camers, and had taken Nequinum, a very strong place on the Nera, near the northern frontier of the old Sabine country: the latter they changed into a Latin colony under the name of Narnia. They extended their colonial system thus far already, and by this means cut off the communication between Etruria and Samnium: at the same time, they had built strongholds like these at the mouth of the Liris, in Minturnæ and Suessa. In Narni, there seems to have been a garrison of Samnite auxiliaries; for it is said in the Fasti, that Q. Fabius, in his fifth, and P. Decius, in his fourth consulship, triumphed over the Umbrians and Samnites. With Samnium, there was peace by this time; but marauding was common among the Samnites.
A visible consequence of the peace with the Samnites, is shown in the relation between the Tarentines and Lucanians. During the war, there is no trace of any unfriendliness between these two peoples; but from the moment that the peace was concluded, there is hostility between them, and the Tarentines have to seek for assistance. This is to be accounted for by the fact, that until then the Samnites had ruled over the Lucanians, and had also made use of them against the Romans. The Tarentines called in Cleonymus, because, as the Greek accounts inform us, they were at war with the Lucanians and Romans: these two nations therefore must have been leagued together. Cleonymus was a prince of Sparta, son of the old king Cleomenes; yet as the succession to the throne there was not fixed, and he might be excluded, he readily listened to the invitation of the Tarentines: he was no common-place man; from that time, however, he became an adventurer, and entered the service of several nations. He brought over with him five thousand men, engaged a still stronger body, and forced the Lucanians to make peace. Hereupon, he got possession of Metapontum, in his own name, or in that of Tarentum; but he oppressed it with contributions, which could not possibly be paid, and he showed himself there to be a true tyrant. To the Tarentines he behaved so ill, that they broke off their connexion with him. They got rid of him; for he was taken into pay by one of the parties against Agathocles of Syracuse. The undertaking miscarried; and as Cleonymus on his return found the territory of the Tarentines closed against him, he seized upon Corcyra, and made it his chief arsenal for further expeditions. From thence he went against the Sallentines, and was defeated by a Roman general; then he marched into Venetia, and through the lagunes, against Padua; but he got on the mudbanks, and was obliged to retreat with some loss. After having roved about for more than twenty years, he returned to Sparta, and accommodated himself to the state of things there: but he was bitterly offended. He then beguiled Pyrrhus into his ill-fated expedition against Sparta, and must have died soon afterwards at an advanced age.
From these notices, circumstances may be gathered which the Roman annals pass over in silence. Not long before this, the Romans had carried on war in Apulia against the Sallentines, who were staunch friends of Tarentum. We now find the Romans allied with the Sallentines against Cleonymus; and hence it is likely that the Tarentines, throughout the Samnite war, were hostile to Rome, and that they made peace with her at the same time as the Lucanians. That a treaty afterwards existed between Rome and Tarentum, is certain; as the violation of a compact, twenty years later, is given as a cause of the war between the two states. One of its conditions was this, that no Roman ship of war was to show itself north of the Lacinian promontory. This treaty is indeed called an ancient one in Livy; but to an historical writer who weighs his words so little, a treaty of twenty years standing may already seem an old one. There cannot have been any concluded earlier, as the Tarentines until then appear to have been always hostile to the Romans.
Besides the eminent men of that age already spoken of, we have to mention Appius Claudius, who on account of the misfortune which befell him, of losing his eyesight, has become celebrated under the name of the Blind. He is quite a strange character, and his acts seem to be most inconsistent, unless we call to mind the times in which he lived. Born and bred in the pride of the patrician party, he goes to such lengths as to refuse as interrex to take any votes for the election of a plebeian consul, a fact which we know from Cicero; and yet he is the first to bring the sons of freedmen into the senate, passing over distinguished men: contrary to usage and custom, he tries, when censor to arrogate to himself extensive powers which had long since been curtailed by the constitutional laws; and in his old age, he again appears as the saviour of the state, who in the day of trouble, by his eloquence upholds the drooping courage of the fainthearted senate. This character is therefore quite a puzzle. If with Dionysius and the modern writers, we were to believe that the struggle at Rome, like that at Athens, was between the rich and the ὄχλος we should think it indeed strange that Appius admitted the children of freedmen into all the tribes, and even placed them in the senate. We must therefore look deeper into the matter, and have before our mind the temper of the parties and classes which existed at the time. During the fifty years which followed the passing of the Licinian law, nobility had already become the attribute of a considerable number of plebeian families, many of which had even then the jus imaginum. Among the patricians, the number of the ennobled families was now very limited; and it is a question, whether the plebeian clans of noble rank were not quite as many as the patrician ones, most of the latter having either become extinct or impoverished: we commonly find over and over again the Claudii, Cornelii, Sulpicii, Furii. The plebeians stood in the same relation to the patricians, as the nobili of the Terra Firma to the city nobles of Venice; had these notables become a corporation, as Maffei proposed, they would have formed a Plebes: but the nobles of Venice hated nothing so much as that very nobility of Padua, Verona, &c., whilst on the contrary they were friendly and kind towards the native low Venetian. This was the relation of the Roman patrician to his client, in contradistinction to the free plebeian order: a proud patrician, like Appius Claudius, looked upon Licinius, Genucius, and others, as most hateful rivals. Such an aristocracy, looking with a most jealous eye on clans whose equal rank it cannot gainsay, seeks for allies from among the very opposites to aristocracy. Such alliances have been most often seen in the South of Europe: the Santafedists at Naples were Lazzaroni; the royalist volunteers in Spain were from the very lowest of the people. Appius appears, on the one hand, as a man of great name in history; on the other, he is spoken of by Livy as a homo vafer, a trickster: this perhaps was not quite an unfounded opinion of him. Appius Claudius, and others of his fellow-patricians, seem to have still entertained the idea of depriving the plebeian nobles of their influence, by calling in a party which of itself could make no claim to honour. Principles like these were fatal in every respect, and hindered the onward march of the constitution. Notwithstanding all this, Appius Claudius was a most distinguished man; and reasons may even be brought forward for his innovations, which would in some measure justify them. He received the children of freedmen into the senate, and distributed the freedmen themselves among the tribes. From this latter point, we must go on again.
It was the distinguishing character of the plebeian order, that its members were landowners, and had their livelihood free and independent, the very reverse of the condition of the clients. The plebeian, like the patrician, was to be well-born, εὐγενής, ingenuus; and therefore, as well as his rival, he added to his name those of his father and grandfather. The libertinus could not thus show proof of his ancestors: if he was a freedman himself, he could not name any father at all; if his father was a freedman, he could but mention him alone; but if his grandfather already had been free, then the wall of partition fell to the ground,—he was perfectly ingenuus, and could be admitted into the tribes. Now in the course of so long a war, the numbers of those who were bound to serve, had very much fallen off, and the conscription was felt to be a heavy burthen. It is a remark of Aristotle, that the character of the Athenian Demos had been much changed in the Peloponnesian war; for its numbers had lessened, and the gaps had been filled up by freedmen and others. If then the Roman people kept to its system of only adding whole tribes, whilst the vacancies in the old ones were scarcely ever filled up, and the enlistments were to be made in the same proportions as before, the citizens who belonged to those old tribes were very hardly dealt with: hence it was but a natural thought, to increase the number of those who were bound to serve. But among the Romans, rights and duties were inseparably united; and thus we may understand why it was that the censor wished to complete the tribes. He who had to bear the burthen of the war, was also to enjoy the advantage of belonging to the commonalty. The undoubted power of the censors to enrol names in the lists of the tribes, the knights, and the senate, and to strike them off likewise, warrants the supposition that the deficiency of two ancestors was not, after all, an insurmountable obstacle to entering the tribes; and that it could not have been altogether a thing unheard of, that freedmen were received in them. Yet if it had been done hitherto, it was in truth but seldom, and in the case of individuals; and the innovation of Appius consisted in this, that he placed the freedmen in a mass among the tribes. In one point of view, this measure was a happy expedient; but there was besides to be considered the change of relations between the different elements of the state, which are to be looked upon in history as always tending to shift their ground. Under the then existing circumstances, the trades might have become of greater importance than they were formerly. If, instead of the slaves, many ærarians carried on the trades and enriched themselves, the relations between the different classes were changed, and the state was then obliged to have regard to their reasonable demands: excessive advantages were not indeed to be granted them, and at the same time, established institutions and vested interests were to be protected against the too luxuriant growth of what was fresh and new. With these principles, free states have always been able to maintain their ground. Thus at that period a class of people is formed, which we now meet with for the first time, namely, the notaries, or scribæ, who had a wider range than the tabelliones under the emperors. They became a guild, which in Cicero’s times was exclusive, and into which one had to pay for admission: its members were people of the most motley description. According to the Roman constitution, no other kind of knowledge was requisite for holding an administrative office, but the artes liberales, which comprised everything that a man of good education was supposed to have learned; on the other hand, the whole mass of that business of which the greater part of the work of officials is made up, was done by the scribæ. Thus there was an immense deal of writing at the prætor’s office; yet the minutes were neither kept by the prætor himself, nor by any other homo ingenuus, but by the scribæ. This profession was very lucrative; all transactions were drawn up in writing by them according to certain forms. These men were employed not by the authorities only, but in every possible kind of business; for the Romans wrote to a fearful amount. They kept all the accounts of the ædiles, the laborious registers of the censors and others, while the functionaries themselves only superintended the whole; they also did the same services for the bankers (negotiatores, equites), as every Roman was obliged to keep his own accounts, his books of receipts and expenses, and this in deference to public opinion, that he might not be considered as a homo levis. For this purpose they frequently kept a scriba.