Under the Yoke: The Samnite Wars

Abstract

In comparison to Rome’s wars against the Celts and Carthaginians, the Roman wars against the Samnites have received and continue to receive relatively little attention, both from modern scholars and from a wider audience. Thus, in the introduction to his study on “Rome’s Samnite Wars”, published 2009, Lukas Grossmann was still able to state that since Salmon’s “standard work on the Samnites, which also deals in detail with the military conflicts with Rome” published in 1967, no more recent monographs on this topic have appeared. Little has changed in this respect in recent years. In more recent standard works on the early Roman Republic, for example by Tim Cornell and Gary Forsythe, the Samnite Wars are of course dealt with in detail, but in many overall representations of the Roman Republic they are treated much less extensively than the Roman–Carthaginian wars or the Roman campaigns against the Hellenistic empires of the eastern Mediterranean. In view of the sometimes enormous dimensions of Rome’s wars against Carthage, for example, and the often much more favourable source situation that can be stated with regard to these later conflicts, this situation is on the one hand easily understandable. On the other hand, the time of the Samnite Wars can and should also be considered an important epoch in Roman history. Especially given that in the last decades of the fourth century, “in which the largest part of the protracted conflicts between Romans and Samnites” took place, the “core for numerous important developments of the Roman Republic” can be located in different areas. Although there is no evidence that Romans or Samnites regarded the campaigns they waged against each other as a part of a struggle for hegemony over Italy, during these decades and as a result of those battles, the Roman sphere of influence on the Italian peninsula expanded considerably, which, like the innovations in the organization and fighting methods of the Roman army, created important conditions for Rome’s great expansionist ventures against Celts and Greeks in Italy, and against Carthaginians and Greeks in Spain, Africa and the Hellenistic world.