From the legendary times, when Latinus, Evander, Æneas, and the rest of Virgil’s heroes are supposed to have occupied the great plain of Latium, down to the final settlement of the district by its subjection to Rome in B.C. 338, the Roman Campagna was peopled by communities chiefly living in towns. Etruria on one side and Latium on the other, contained confederacies of independent cities, with one or other of which the Romans were constantly at war. Etruria gave way first, and after the fall of Veii in B.C. 395, the Roman dominions extended northwards as far as the Lago Bracciano and Civita Castellana.
At that time the great confederacy of Latium, though Alba was destroyed, still existed under the Hegemony of Rome as the successor of Alba, and numbered Tibur, Præneste, Tusculum, Aricia, Antium, Lanuvium, Velitræ, Pedum, and Nomentum among its members. But after the victories gained by the consuls of the year B.C. 338, the absorption of the Latin cities made rapid progress, and the character of the population of the Campagna began to be completely changed.[127] In this, the second period of the history of the Campagna, the towns were gradually reduced to mere villages, the small farmers disappeared, and the land was occupied by the immense estates (latifundia) of rich proprietors cultivated by hordes of slaves. Such is the condition in which we find the Campagna in the time of Cicero.[128] The great villas which strew the ground everywhere in the neighbourhood of Rome with their ruins were then constructed, and the colossal aqueducts which served not only to supply Rome with water but also to irrigate the farms and country seats of the Campagna.
There seems to have been a constant tendency during the later republic and early empire to reduce the amount of arable land, and to increase the extent of pasturage in the Campagna. Thus the country was rendered less and less healthy, and Rome became gradually more dependent than ever on foreign countries for her supply of corn.
The last phase of the history of the Roman Campagna is the most melancholy. The aqueducts were nearly all destroyed by the Gothic army at the siege of Rome under Vitiges in A.D. 536, and the great country seats of the Roman nobles and princes must have been ruined by the successive devastations of Roman territory during the fifth and sixth centuries in which the Lombards were the principal actors. Agriculture ceased, and the few villages and country houses which remained soon became uninhabitable during a great part of the year, in consequence of the increase of malarious exhalations arising from the uncultivated state of the soil, or were rendered unsafe by the lawless bands of ruffian marauders who infested the open country. Such is in the main the condition of the Roman Campagna at the present day, for the most part a waste of ragged pastures without human habitations, and wild jungles tenanted only by foxes, bears, and other wild animals.
The above remarks will serve to show that after B.C. 338 the Campagna became deprived of all historical interest except as the summer residence of the great Roman proprietors. Its history belongs almost entirely to the early times of the Roman Republic.
CHAPTER IX.
(A) THE VIA APPIA AND THE ALBAN HILLS.
The Appian Road.