[37] [The annalists were probably wrong in supposing that Rome was without magistrates for this period. Doubtless their error is due to chronological confusion.]
CHAPTER VIII. THE CONQUEST OF CENTRAL ITALY
THE SAMNITES
The fifth century is the most beautiful century of Rome. The plebeians had conquered the consulship and are succeeding in conquering their admission to other magistracies which the patricians wished to reserve; they free themselves from the servitude which, under the name of Nexus, weighed on the debtors. They arrive at political equality and individual independence; at the same time the old aristocracy still dominates in the senate and maintains there the inflexibility of its resolves and the persistence of its designs. It was thanks to this interior condition that the Roman people was able to survive the strongest tests from without over which it had triumphed, and to make that progress which cost it most dear. We see the peoples fight, one by one, and often all together; the Latin people, the Etruscans, the Goths, the Samnites, the other Sabellic peoples of the Apennines; and the end is always victory. The beginnings of this history were sombre. Rome was afflicted by one of those pestilences which one finds in all the epochs of the history of this unsanitary city. Thence was the origin of those scenic pieces imported by the Etruscans and giving origin to comedy—a means devised to appease the gods; so that Roman comedy had an origin religious and dismal. The fifth century is for Rome the age of great devotions and of grand sacrifices.[d]
We must now carry our eyes beyond the plain of Latium, and penetrate into Campania and the valleys of the Apennines.
The Sabines are a people connected with the earliest legends of Rome. But the Sabines of Cures and the country between the Anio and the Tiber are those who have hitherto engaged our attention. It is in the highlands of Reate and Amiternum that we must search for the cradle of the race. The valleys of this high district afford but scanty subsistence; and the hardy mountaineers ever and anon cast off swarms of emigrants, who sought other homes, and made good their claim by arms. It was a custom of the Sabellian tribes, when famine threatened and population became dense, to devote the whole produce of one spring-time to the gods. Among other produce, the youth born in that year were dedicated to the god Mamers (Mars), and went forth to seek their fortunes abroad. On one such occasion the emigrants, pressing southward from the Sabine highlands, occupied the broad mountainous district which lies northward of Campania, and took the name of Samnites. The Picenians and Frentanians, on the north coast, with the four allied cantons of the Vestinians, Marrucinians, Pelignians, and Marsians, who were interposed between the Samnites and their ancestral Sabines, claimed kin with both nations. The Samnites themselves also formed four cantons—the Caracenians, Pentrians, Caudinians, and Hirpinians. Of these the Pentrians were far the most considerable; they occupied the rugged mountain district between the upper valleys of the Vulturnus and the Calor. Here a great mass of mountains, now known by the name of Mount Matese, rises boldly from the central chain to the height of more than six thousand feet; and its steep defiles offer defences of great natural strength. But the remains of massive polygonal masonry, which are still seen on the rocky heights occupied by their towns of Æsernia and Bovianum (Isernia and Bojano), showed that the Samnites used art to strengthen their natural defences. Below Mount Matese, in the valley of the Calor, lay the canton of the Caudinians, whose town of Beneventum (anciently called Maleventum or Maliessa) was also made strong by art. It is within these limits, from Æsernia to Beneventum, that the scenes of the chief campaigns of the Samnite wars were laid.