Part 15

The real name of this nation in Oscan was _Sauini_ or _Savini_. On the denarii which were coined during the Social War, we read on the one side _Safinim_, a genitive plural, and on the other _C. Papi Mutil_, the name of the celebrated Samnite commander. The Papii were as important a Samnite gens as the Cornelii among the Romans. I will not decide whether the name _Safinim_ applies to the Samnites alone or to the whole Sabellian race, as all the Sabellian tribes took part in the insurrection of the Social War. In Greek they are called Σαυνῖται, and their country Σαύνιον, formed from the same root as the Oscan name. Scylax of Caryanda, who, as you remember, lived at the time of Philip of Macedonia, says of the Samnites: διήκουσιν ἀπὸ θαλάσσης εἰς θάλασσαν, that is, from the upper to the lower sea. On the upper sea we find the Frentanians whom Strabo reckons among the Samnites; Samnites also were the ruling people in the country about Herculaneum, Pompeii, and the cape of Minerva as far as the frontiers of Lucania. If we follow the traces which occur in Livy, the country of the Samnites is more extensive also in the north and south than we find it in our maps, even those of D’Anville. It here becomes very manifest how insufficient a single map is to form correct boundary lines. Thus Samnium, in the map of D’Anville, whom I name here only _honoris causa_, is quite unsatisfactory; there ought to be a whole series of Maps to show the different boundaries at different times. The geography of towns, however, may be studied from a single map. It is utterly impossible for a man attentively studying ancient history with D’Anville’s map before him, to form a clear notion of Samnium. Its extent in that map does not refer to any particular time at all, though it answers most to the Augustan region of that name, but it does not it exactly represent either. According to Livy, the Apulians, when pressed by the Samnites, threw themselves into the arms of the Romans; the Samnites had captured Luceria and conquered several places in the Apulian high lands, nay, they had extended their possessions as far as Venusia and Acheruntia, but were repelled by the victorious Romans. In the west, too, we meet with Samnites; Fregellae had been taken by them from the Volscians, but was afterwards likewise taken possession of by the Romans. In like manner we find Sora, and even Casinum, in the hands of the Samnites. The case of the latter town is mentioned by an author in whose work we should hardly look for it, and yet it is a statement which ought not to escape the notice of an historian. The historical inquirer must also examine the grammarians whose works contain facts of the greatest historical importance in fragments and accidental quotations. Such is the case, e.g., in the commentary of Servius and the scholiast on Juvenal;[51] it is, however, not only in writers of this class and in Festus that we may expect historical statements, but we find them in the authors of real grammars, such as Nonius, Diomedes, and Priscian; they contain much that is of value and ought not to be despised. Such also is the case here, for it is Varro who, in his work “De Lingua Latina,”[52] states, that Casinum was inhabited by Samnites. Hence we see that they extended as far as the neighbourhood of Arpinum and Monte Cassino, and that they had subdued the whole district between the upper Vulturnus and the upper Liris. It was, therefore, for the purpose of extending their dominion in that part, that they undertook the war against the Sidicines.

The Samnites, as we have seen, did not form a compact nation, they were not united by one capital, they had no permanent government to keep the whole together, and they formed no _civitas_, but a _populus_, not a πόλις, but an ἔθνος. They consisted of four or five different tribes, which were not more closely united with one another than the Romans, Latins, and Hernicans, or even not more closely than the Romans, Latins, and Volscians of Ecetrae were at various times. Thus it happened that the Frentanians, though a Samnite people, concluded, during the second Samnite war, a separate peace with Rome and allowed her armies a passage through Abruzzo into Apulia. Velleius Paterculus states, that on one occasion the Romans were defeated by the Caudines alone, and in the Triumphal Fasti we read, that a general triumphed _de Samnitibus omnibus praeter Pentros_. So long as the Romans stood on a footing of equality with the Latins and Hernicans, the Samnites were able to keep them within due bounds; but when they themselves had assisted the Romans in reducing the Latins to the condition of subjects, the compactness of the Roman state was against them, and they were no longer equally matched. No wonder, therefore, that they succumbed to the Romans; but it is surprising to find that, after all, they were able to hold out in a struggle like the second Samnite war, which lasted twenty-four years and a half. And notwithstanding this, they rose again with the force of despair, which hopes for nothing and destroys its own existence.

We must conceive each Samnite tribe to have had its own senate, from which deputies were elected to deliberate on common affairs, as the Romans and Latins did at the Feriae Latinae. In this manner the Samnite praetors and imperators met, perhaps with deputies and the heads of the senate (_decem primi_).

Samnium, in this extended sense, is a country presenting very different aspects. The part extending on the coast from Herculaneum as far as the Silarus, belongs, according to its physical features, most decidedly to southern Italy; I will not say that it is essentially a Hellenic country, but it is like a Hellenic, it is a Tyrrhenian country. It had originally a Tyrrhenian population, though it was governed by Samnites, and at an earlier period probably by Oscans. In the interior, we have the Apennines, a very beautiful mountain country with some very fertile valleys, and on the whole such as we generally understand by a mountainous region. The hills nowhere rise to the height of the Abruzzi, and nowhere beyond the limits of vegetation; they are woody mountains, and the forests are for the most part still preserved. The country of the Frentanians is hilly, and in no way remarkable.

The Samnite tribes were distributed in the following manner:—The FRENTANIANS dwelt on the other side of the Apennines as far as the Adriatic. The PENTRIANS were the northernmost tribe in the interior, between the country of the Pelignians and the neighbourhood of Beneventum; their capital was Bovianum. In the south of them we have the CAUDINES, who unquestionably possessed the whole district about the river Calor, a tributary of the Vulturnus, and Beneventum. The HIRPINIANS dwelt still farther south, between the Caudines, Lucanians, and Apulians. On the south-west of the Hirpinians the coast district extended from mount Vesuvius to the river Silarus; the Samnites of this last district, as I have already observed, are not known to us under any certain ethnic name, though it is probable that they may have been called _Alfaterni_ or _Alfaterini_.

In maps you will find in that district where Salernum was situated, the name _Picentia_ or _Picentini_; but this name does not belong to the early times. Strabo says that they were transplanted thither as an ἀποδασμὸς of the Picentini on the upper sea. This must have taken place before the Hannibalian war, for at that time the Picentians were among the nations which rose against Rome. This is not the place for entering into minute discussions, I will only state, as the result of my inquiries, that this happened after the Samnite wars. When the Romans conquered that district and found it greatly depopulated, they transplanted the Picentini thither for the purpose of preventing the communication of the Samnites with the lower sea; for they might obtain assistance from the Tarentines, with whom they were on terms of friendship. By the same means, the very enterprising Agathocles, who would have liked to gain a firm footing in southern Italy, was kept away from that coast. The communication with the Lucanians, who were allied with Rome during the second and third war, also was kept open in this manner; and it was of great importance to Rome to maintain this connection.

Among the Frentanians there is no town worth mentioning.

Among the Pentrians we have BOVIANUM, which appears in Roman history at first as a great place; but all Samnite towns of the interior had this feature in common, that they were, properly speaking, not fortified. This circumstance has led to a foolish assertion which occurs in the writings of some of the ancients, though men like Strabo did not believe it. The friendship subsisting between the Samnites and Tarentines gave rise to a wish among the former to be regarded as kinsmen of the Tarentines, and hence the fancy that the Samnites were a Lacedaemonian colony. This singular notion was then supported by accidental circumstances, as for example, by the fact that the Samnite towns were open places. There is in reality no trace of a truly fortified town in all Samnium; but the case of those towns which the Samnites conquered beyond their own frontiers is of course different. The Samnite towns were situated on hills, the sides of which were cut precipitously; and such a situation may at first have been sufficient; but it was of no avail against bold and daring enemies like the Romans, who attacked a place, _cingebant corona_, and then stormed it by means of ladders. The consequence was, that Bovianum and other towns, when the Romans were masters of the country around, offered no resistance, but were scaled and devastated. But they soon rose again, though with smaller houses and of less extent. During the Samnite wars, Bovianum was destroyed three or four times in the course of a few years; and hence we may form some idea as to the condition in which it must have been. But notwithstanding all this, we again find it as a respectable town at the period of the Hannibalian war; in that of Sulla it was entirely destroyed; and he sent a military colony into the place, because he wanted to punish it, but did not rebuild it on its ancient site; the new town he founded in the neighbourhood of the old one was called _Bovianum Undecumanorum_. In like manner, he did not restore Faesulae, but founded Florentia, at some distance on the river Arnus. At Arretium he followed the same system. At present, Bovianum is quite an insignificant place; it occupies the site of the Roman and not of the Samnite town. From this one example, you may infer the fate of all the Samnite towns: many of them, the conquest of which is mentioned by Livy in his ninth and tenth books, entirely disappear from the earth, so that they are not mentioned either by Pliny or by Ptolemy. The country is at present full of towns and villages, but very few of their names are indicative of their ancient origin. In all Samnium there is not a single ruin belonging to the period preceding the Roman dominion. I have not been there, but Count Zurlo, a Samnite by birth, who has examined his own country very carefully, has assured me that, with the exception of the few Samnite denarii and some copper coins, no antiquities older than the Roman dominion are found in all Samnium, from the extreme frontier of the Pentrians to that of the Hirpinians; nor are there any tombs which are of such frequent occurrence in Campania. But it could not have been otherwise, for the Romans systematically destroyed everything in that country; otherwise such an utter disappearance of everything would be unaccountable: both during the third Samnite war and in that of Sulla, the Romans attempted to extirpate the whole nation. Strabo says that only ἴχνη πόλεων ἀμαυρὰ were left; and as the nation so also its language disappeared. Such was the revenge Sulla took for the battle at the Colline gate! He not only butchered the prisoners of war, but after having become master of Italy, he rooted out the whole population.

In the country of the Pentrians, there are a few places, especially on the west of the Vulturnus, concerning which it is doubtful whether they were properly Samnite, that is, belonging to the Pentrians, or whether they were Oscan towns conquered by the Samnites. Places of this kind are ALLIFAE and AQUINUM[53], a large town on the Via Latina and a praefectura Romana, that is, it had the Roman franchise before its being conferred upon all the Italians, but the administration was in the hands of a Roman praefectus. Aquinum was the birth-place of the great poet Juvenal. A third town was AESERNIA, which, after the third Samnite war, became a Roman colony.

Previously to the second Samnite war, the dominion of the Samnites extended over the whole district between the upper Liris and the Vulturnus. They had occupied Casinum and Fregellae, and the second war broke out, because the Romans wanted to fortify Fregellae for the purpose of protecting their own frontier against the Samnites. The letter of the treaty in this instance was at variance with reason, for the Samnites in possession of Fregellae might have become dangerous to Rome herself.

BENEVENTUM was the most important place in central Samnium, although there can be no doubt that Caudium gave its name to the people. The Romans changed the name of the town because of its ominous meaning; for it is said to have formerly been called _Maleventum_. But Maleventum or Maluentum is not a Latin word at all, but has its origin in the Greek Μαλοῦς, Μαλόεις, Apple-town. This name too, therefore, shows that Itali (Siculi) dwelt there before the Oscans. Salmasius, in his “Exercitationes Plinianae” (a book of which we may well say, φάρμακα πολλὰ μὲν ἐσθλὰ μεμιγμένα, πολλὰ δὲ λυγρά), first drew attention to the etymology of Maleventum. The whole plan of that book is beneath criticism; it is a real chaos, and we cannot help being vexed at the careless haste with which he has put together the most erroneous opinions. But it contains much information culled from writers which are otherwise not often read. Salmasius is unfortunate in his emendations, in mythology and grammar he is bad, though sometimes he makes a very good remark, as e.g., on the subject now under our consideration. In the history of the Samnite wars, Beneventum is but rarely mentioned, whence it would seem that it was then still an insignificant place. But the Romans conquered it, and after the third Samnite war established a colony there, as they generally did _in locis opportunis_; and by means of this colony they in reality broke the power of Samnium. After this time Beneventum maintained itself by the side of the sinking Samnite towns, and was of great importance to the Romans in the Social War. Under the empire it was a very considerable provincial town, whence there are few places of which such splendid ruins are extant; among others we there have a triumphal arch of Trajan.

CAUDIUM, on the road from Capua to Beneventum, must once have been a considerable town, because it gave its name to the people. As a town, however, it is scarcely mentioned, and only Horace in his journey to Brundusium speaks of _Caudi cauponae_. This is one of the instances which we have seen before in the case of Gabii, Fidenae, and others: on the site of destroyed places afterwards new ones arose out of inns which were built at stations on the high-roads. Several Samnite places, which are mentioned in Livy, but of which the sites cannot be ascertained, may have been situated there. We can scarcely form conjectures about them.

The third Samnite tribe, or, including the Frentanians, the fourth, are the HIRPINIANS, in the district of the modern Avellino, inhabiting one of the most beautiful hilly countries, between Beneventum, Lucania, and Salernum. It possesses extraordinary advantages over the northern part of the territory of Naples in regard to climate, for it is a perfectly southern country, although its heights are not inconsiderable: its capital was COMPSA, about which I have nothing particular to relate; it was one of the towns that joined Hannibal, and after having already suffered greatly during a previous conquest, it was completely razed to the ground somewhere between the seventh and tenth year of the war. But as it was afterwards rebuilt, the Romans nevertheless restored its independence. During the Social War it made common cause with the Samnite nation.

The really Greek portion of the Samnite territory is about the cape of Minerva from Surrentum to Salernum. On the ridge of this part, between mount Vesuvius and Salernum, we have NUCERIA, a very large and flourishing town, the wealth and character of which are attested by its extremely beautiful silver coins, which are in no way inferior to those of Greece.

I have already mentioned _Pompeii_ and _Herculaneum_ in speaking of Campania. SURRENTUM is well known as one of the most enchanting places on the whole face of the earth. Although the ancients were not as enthusiastic in their admiration of beautiful scenery as the moderns, still even among them it was celebrated as a place of indescribable charms.

The coast on the bay of Salernum was occupied by the PICENTINI, whom I have already mentioned, and whom the Romans had transplanted thither from Picenum after the Samnite wars. In the earliest times, a great number of Tyrrhenian places existed on that bay, from which it is evident that there was in that part a considerable Pelasgian population, which, though subdued, maintained itself for a long time.

SALERNUM was not a place of great importance in antiquity, but in the history of the middle ages it is celebrated as the place of residence of the Lombard kings. Until the Hannibalian war, Salernum and the surrounding country belonged to the Campanians, for the Romans appeased their allies of those places on which they had conferred the franchise without the suffrage, by ceding domain lands to them. Afterwards Salernum became a Roman colony. The river Silarus formed the boundary between that part of Samnium and Lucania.

On the coast of the most southern part of Samnium, AMALFI arose as a flourishing republic at an early period of the middle ages, during the time of the Lombards. The local belief is, that Amalfi was a Roman colony of the imperial period. For reasons which we can easily imagine, the opinion became established, that Constantine had led a Roman colony to Constantinople; and at Amalfi a tradition sprang up, that a fleet with Roman colonists, destined for Byzantium, was wrecked on that coast, or compelled by adverse winds to land, and that the colonists then established themselves there. This whole story is neither more nor less credible than so many others about colonies which were said to have been founded by the heroes returning from Troy. Amalfi is never before mentioned, and became important at the time when the Lombards conquered the interior of the country, and pushed the inhabitants towards the coast; the people naturally called themselves Romans as opposed to Lombards and barbarians. The town, like Naples, was under the direct protection of Constantinople, and was altogether non-barbarian; it belonged to the class of free cities, which had preserved a free Roman municipal constitution, and was very different from the free cities which arose under German laws.

APULIA.

The name Apulia, no doubt, signifies the country of the _Apuli_. _Apulus_ is of the same formation as _Romulus_, the same as _Romanus_, just as _Graeculus_ is the same as _Graecus_, etc. Accordingly, _Apulus_, _Apus_, and _Apicus_, and with a change of vowel, _Opicus_, are identical. The Oscan language has the letter _p_ where the Latin has _qu_ (pronounced as _k_), and just as in the Greek dialects π and κ are interchangeable. _Apulus_, therefore, is in no way different from _Aequi_, _Aequuli_, _Aequani_. If we attentively trace the dialects, there is scarcely any nation which admits such great changes in them as the Oscan. It is a very correct and ancient law of logic, “principia praeter necessitatem non esse multiplicanda,” and in the history of ancient nations, too, it ought not to be lost sight of. It certainly is true, that sometimes we recognise the existence of many quite different nations living close to one another—in the Caucasus and in America, there are districts of not many square miles, in which great numbers of languages are spoken, that do not bear the slightest resemblance to one another; and in like manner essentially different nations dwell side by side in a portion of Africa—but we, nevertheless, cannot adopt such lists of nations as are given by the ancients, for they are not rationally arranged, and are often without any meaning at all. The ancients had no interest in forming accurate notions on such points; when they dwelt upon inquiries of this kind, matters became almost worse: they then wrote thoughtlessly, putting down things as essentially different, which seemed to present ever so slight a difference, and treating as identical those which were really different. There does not exist a more singular mass of confusion than in Pliny’s account of the different nations. I know from experience, how many stages a man has to pass through before he arrives at positive certainty upon such questions. Garve very truly says, “the second is the beginning.” A person assuming that in Italy everything was originally different, feels as if a wheel were spinning round in his head; and he soon arrives at the conviction that his supposition has no meaning, and gives up the whole matter in despair. I have experienced this same thing, but did not rest until I arrived at a definite result. The subject does not suffer from its being confused: many things are treated with scorn, merely because they are abused; if things were not represented in a false light, there would be no danger of things deserving attention ever being scorned. But it does happen, when things are erroneously conceived, and are defended with obstinacy, when they cannot be defended at all. It is the sad but natural consequence of such a defence of what is opposed to reason and truth, that many men despise even that which is deserving of consideration. Hence so many follies. A fancy of this kind during the period of my youth, was the belief in perfectibility, when people imagined that in every respect they were far above their ancestors. But it is an equally great folly unconditionally to praise our ancestors, and to forget that there is an endless number of points in which we move sometimes forward and sometimes backward. The question whether an entire period is superior or inferior to another, is of a very different nature, and one which it is difficult to answer, if it is put in a rational way. I should least of all wish to exchange the present time for the middle ages, which fools only praise as the happiest era in history. There can be no doubt that in the middle ages life was more intense, sympathies were stronger, and activity was more vigorous; but our age has other advantages, and our progress in science especially is immense. When I compare the moral condition of our age with what it was a hundred or a hundred and twenty years ago, I cannot hesitate for a moment, with a full knowledge of all the facts, to say that our age, not only in Germany, but even in France, is infinitely better.