The Historians' History of the World 05 [The Roman Republic]

While Fabius was conducting the war in Etruria, his colleague C. Marcius had entered Samnium and taken Allifæ and some other strongholds. The Samnites collected their forces and gave him battle, and the Romans were defeated; several of their officers slain, the consul himself wounded, and their communication with Rome cut off. When the news reached Rome, the senate at once resolved to create a dictator, and to send him off to the relief of Marcius with the reserve which had been levied on account of the Etruscan War. Their hopes lay in L. Papirius Cursor; but the dictator could only be named by the consul; there was no way of reaching Marcius, and Fabius had not yet forgiven the man who had thirsted after his blood. The resolve of the senate was borne to Fabius by consulars; they urged him to sacrifice his private feelings to the good of his country: he heard them in silence, his eyes fixed on the ground, and they retired in uncertainty. In the stillness of the night he arose, and, as was the usage, named L. Papirius dictator, and in the morning he again listened in silence to the thanks and praises of the deputies. The dictator immediately set forth and relieved the army of Marcius, but, impetuous as he was, he contented himself for some time with merely observing the enemy.

[310-304 B.C.]

At length the time arrived for a decisive action. The Samnite army was divided into two corps, the one clad in purple, the other in white linen tunics, the former having their brazen shields adorned with gold, the latter with silver: the shields were broad above, narrow below. Each soldier wore a crested helmet, a large sponge to protect his breast, and a greave on his left leg. In the battle the Roman dictator led the right wing against the gold-shielded, the master of the horse, C. Junius, the left against the silver-shielded Samnites. Junius made the first impression on the enemy; the dictator urged his men to emulation, and the Roman horse by a charge on both flanks completed the victory. The Samnites fled to their camp, but were unable to retain it, and ere night it was sacked and burned. The golden shields adorned the dictator’s triumph, and they were then given to the money dealers to ornament their shops in the Forum.

Q. Fabius was continued in the consulate for 309 and P. Decius given to him as his colleague; the former had the Samnite, the latter the Etruscan War. Fabius routed the Marsians and Pelignians, who had now joined against Rome, and he then led his legions into Umbria, whose people had taken arms, and with little difficulty reduced them to submission. Decius meantime had forced the Etruscans to sue for peace, and a year’s truce was granted them on their giving each soldier two tunics, and a year’s pay for the army.

In the remaining years of the war, the exhausted powers of the Samnites could offer but a feeble resistance to the legions of Rome. On the occasion of a defeat which they sustained in 308, the proconsul, Q. Fabius, adopted the novel course of dismissing the Samnite prisoners, and selling for slaves those of their allies. Among these there were several Hernicans, whom he sent to Rome; the senate having instituted an inquiry into the conduct of the Hernican people in this affair, those who had urged them to give aid to the Samnites now engaged them to take arms openly. All the Hernican peoples but three shared in the war; but they made a stand little worthy of their old renown; one short campaign sufficed for their reduction, and they were placed (307) on nearly the same footing as the Latins had been thirty years before.

The Samnites at length (304) sued for peace, and obtained it on the condition they had so often spurned, that of acknowledging Rome’s supremacy, in other words, of yielding up their independence; but peace on any terms was now necessary, that they might recruit their strength for future efforts. The Romans then turned their arms against the Æquians who had joined the Hernicans in aiding the Samnites, and in fifty days the consuls reduced and destroyed forty-one of their Cyclopean-walled towns. The Marsian league sought and obtained peace from Rome.

THE THIRD SAMNITE AND ETRUSCAN WARS

[304-297 B.C.]

A few years passed away in tolerable tranquillity; in 298 Lucanian envoys appeared at Rome, praying for aid against the Samnites who had entered their country in arms, given them various defeats, and taken several of their towns. The Romans, in right of their supremacy, sent orders to the Samnites to withdraw their troops from Lucania: the pride of the Samnites was roused at being thus reminded of their subjection; they ordered the fetials off their territory, and war was once more declared against them by the Romans. As the Etruscans were now also in arms, the consul L. Cornelius Scipio went against them, while his colleague Cn. Fulvius invaded Samnium.