This new power did not take its rise among those who had hitherto been the most formidable foes of Greece—the Sabello-Oscan tribes, whom Plato dreaded. These last were a race of warlike mountaineers living under a free system of tribal government, something like the Swiss of the later Middle Ages, except that cavalry, as well as infantry, played an important part in their armies. Like the Swiss, they strove to extend their borders on every side beyond the narrow limits of their native land. But they lacked what the Swiss of the Four Cantons gained by their league with Berne and Zurich—a steady political aim; tribe jostled tribe, the remoter endeavouring to wrest from the nearer what the latter had won. Thus, though they might subjugate cities of Greece, they were incapable of creating a great homogeneous state. The Caraceni, Pentri, Caudini, and Hirpini, the four tribes of the mountain tract about the sources of the Volturnus and its tributaries, were the only ones which constituted a compact federation. After the middle of the fourth century these tribes began to press forward in every direction, against the Apulians to the east, the Lucanians to the south, the Campanians, Sidicinians, and Volscians to the west. But there they were confronted by a power which was destined to prove greater than they.
As early as the sixth century, during the Etruscan period, the city of Rome on the Tiber had grown into a large and important community. After the overthrow of foreign dominion and the fall of the monarchy, it maintained its supremacy over at least the majority of the country townships of the little Latin nation, which laboriously warded off the attacks of its neighbours under Roman hegemony. Not till about the year 400 did it succeed in driving the Æqui and Volscians back into their mountain fastnesses; and in 388 it took the neighbouring Etruscan city of Veii. The great Celtic invasion brought it to the verge of ruin; but having survived this peril it maintained its former predominance after the withdrawal of the enemy. With the Greeks it was on friendly terms; from of old, Greek civilisation had found almost as ready acceptance among the Latins as among the Etruscans, and in the struggle with the latter people Latins and Greeks had fought side by side. The middle of the fourth century witnessed a great expansion of Roman power; the Romans conquered the Volscians and several refractory Latin cities, and vanquished their Etruscan neighbours, and in the year 350 the Etruscan city of Cære joined the Roman confederacy. At the same time Rome extended her dominion in the valley of the Liris and towards the coast; and in the latter quarter the great city of Capua (together with Cumæ, now an Oscan city, and many others) threw themselves into the arms of Rome for protection against the Samnites. Soon after, in 336-334, Capua and the Latin towns, which had revolted, were completely subjugated, and most of them incorporated into the Roman body politic. Peace had been maintained up to this time with the Samnites, to whom the south of the Campania and the valley of the upper Liris had been abandoned; but when, in 325, Rome gained a footing in Fregellæ and took the Greeks of Naples under her protection, an open conflict broke out between the two states, each of which was doing its utmost to extend its borders in Italy.
In spite of the higher level of civilisation to which it had risen, the state of Rome, like that of the Samnites, was a state of farmers. But it possessed what the Samnite tribal organisation lacked, a superior political system, which gave it the advantage of the municipal form of government, on exactly the same lines as the municipal republics of Greece. But with this municipal organisation it combined (and therein lay the secret of its success) a capacity for expansion and an ever increasing extension of civil rights which offers the strongest contrast to the churlish spirit of the Greek cities. In the latter, purity of descent and the exclusion of all foreigners from civil rights was an axiom of political life, to which radical democracies, like Athens, clung even more tenaciously than the rest; and the consequence was that every success abroad led to the subjugation of the vanquished under the yoke of the ruling city. Rome, on the contrary, for all her conquests, made no subjects in Italy. In her own vicinity, and in Latium first of all, conquered communities were usually admitted to the Roman political confederacy on equal terms, and allowed to retain local autonomy (as municipia) under Roman supervision. She extended the same system far into middle Italy; the franchise and the right of voting in the Roman popular assemblies (comitia) being withheld only from communities of alien language, like the Etruscan Cærites, and the Campanians of Capua. In other cases, when Rome had vanquished a foe she took possession of a portion of the public lands, and established citizens there as settlers to cultivate the soil; the rest of the citizens retained complete liberty and political autonomy (Rome, however, altering the system of government according to her own good pleasure and taking care that the administration fell into the hands of her own adherents), but were pledged by an everlasting covenant to follow the Roman standards as free allies. Moreover, Rome had founded colonies in the heart of the enemy’s country, daughter-cities organised as independent municipalities, which occupied the same position towards her as formerly (before 336) the cities of the Latin League, and were consequently known as Latin colonies. By this organisation Rome not only maintained possession, in every instance, of the territory she had won, but made provision for a constant supply of sound and capable peasantry, from whose ranks the army was recruited. While retaining, in her political administration, the form of a city, she had in effect far outgrown its limitations and become a great state, with all its forces at the disposal of the government unconditionally. To this circumstance it is due that while the constitution recognised the absolute sovereignty of the people (the abolition of the whole body of aristocratic privilege belongs to this very period)[1] the government remained vested in the hands of the great families of patrician and plebeian descent, and the dignity of office, which was degraded to a mere phantom in the Greek democracies, remained virtually undiminished in Rome. The interests of the farming class and of the dominant families went hand in hand; the former profited by the agrarian policy of expansion on which the latter insisted, and every success abroad, no matter at what cost, consolidated and increased the strength of the community, and led a step farther on the road to supreme dominion.
In numbers, military capacity, and martial ardour, the Samnites were at least a match for the Romans, their generals were possibly superior to those of Rome in ability; the Samnites won more victories than their adversaries in the open field. The Samnites’ farming communities perished through the defects of their political organisation; they could not make a breach in the solid fabric of the might of Rome, nor master the Roman fortresses, even though they might capture one now and again; while, thanks to her superior civilisation and the supplies of money, provisions, and war material furnished by the various cities within her territory, Rome was able to carry on war much more continuously than the Samnite farmer, whose armies could not remain in the field for more than a few weeks at a time, because, like the Peloponnesians in the war with Athens, their stock of provisions was exhausted and they were obliged to return home to till their land. In addition to this disadvantage, all their neighbouring tribes, the clans in the Abruzzi, the Apulians, and for a while even the Lucanians, took the part of Rome.
In spite of all their successes in the field the Samnites realised that they could not permanently withstand the Romans single-handed; they endeavoured to drag the other nations of Italy into the contest, and thus the long conflict took on the character of a decisive struggle for the sovereignty of Italy. Twice the Samnites succeeded in bringing about a great coalition; in 308 the Etruscans flung themselves upon Rome, in 295 the Samnite troops joined the hordes of the Celts in Umbria, while the Etruscans flew to arms once more. The Romans remained victors on both occasions, and the great battle of Sentinum in 295 decided the fate of Italy. When the war ended, in the year 290, Rome was the dominant power in Italy, and the submission of such portions of the country as still retained their independence was merely a matter of time. It was too late then for Tarentum to step into the breach and invoke the aid of Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, too late for the latter to resume the strife in the old spirit of the struggle of Greece against the Italians and Carthaginians. The particularist temper of the Greeks brought his successes to nought as soon as they were won; for all his superior ability as a commander, and though he defeated the Romans, he could not but recognise at once the superiority of their military system. Though he advanced to the frontiers of Latium and from afar saw the enemy’s capital at his feet, he could not shatter the framework of the Roman state, and he ultimately succumbed to the Romans on the battle-field of Beneventum (275).
Rome had now completed the conquest of Italy up to the margin of the valley of the Po, and had everywhere inaugurated the system sketched in broad outline above. How firmly she had welded it was proved by the fiery test of the war of Hannibal. There was no lack of the particularist spirit even in Italy, and the numerous nationalities which inhabited the peninsula, none of whom understood the language of the others, had no such common bond as knit the various tribes of Greece together. In the territory over which Rome ruled in 264, no less than six different languages were spoken, without counting the Ligurians, Celts, and Veneti. But Rome, by repressing all open insubordination with inflexible energy while at the same time pursuing a liberal policy with regard to the interests of the dependent communities and leaving scope for local autonomy as long as it was not dangerous to herself, did more than create a political entity; from this germ begins to grow a sentiment of Italian nationality that reaches beyond racial differences, and the new nation of the Italians or toga-wearers (togati) has come to the birth.
The mainspring of Roman success was the policy of agrarian expansion, and the farmers were the first to profit by it. This fact rendered impossible the development of a municipal democracy after the Greek model (such as Appius Claudius had attempted to set up in 308) based upon capital, trade, and handicraft, and the masses of the urban population, with an all-powerful demagogue at its head.
From that time forward the urban population, restricted as it was to four districts, was practically overridden, as far as political rights were concerned, in the comitia tributa (with which ordinary legislation rested) by the thirty-one districts of the agricultural class. But as the state grew into a great power and its chief town into a metropolis, the urban elements could not fail to acquire increasing influence, especially the wealthy capitalists (consisting largely of freedmen and the descendants of freedmen) who managed all matters of public finance. In the comitia centuriata which were organised on the basis of a property qualification, and whose functions included the election of magistrates and the settlement of peace and war, these circles exercised very great influence, and the wealthiest found a compact organisation in the eighteen centuries of knights.
The interests of the agricultural class did not extend beyond Italy; the late wars had provided plenty of land for distribution, and if more were wanted it could be found in the territory of the Celts on the Po, the southern portion of which had been conquered as early as 282 but not yet divided. The interests of the urban elements, the capitalists, on the contrary, extended beyond the sea. To them the most pressing business of the moment was to vindicate the preponderance of the state to the outside world, to adjust their relations abroad as best suited their own interests, and to deliver Italy from foreign competition, and, above all, from Carthage; and not a few of the great ruling families were allured, like the Claudii, by the tempting prospect.