The Three Samnite Wars: Conquest of Central Italy
Rome fought the Samnites three times over fifty-three years and became the master of Italy by doing it. The Samnites were a confederation of hill peoples in the central Apennines, organised for war, with a population comparable to Rome's own and better ground. The first war from 343 BC was short. The second, from 326 BC, produced the worst humiliation in early Roman history: two consular armies were trapped in a defile at the Caudine Forks in 321 BC, surrendered without a fight, and were made to pass under a yoke of spears in their undergarments, after which Rome repudiated the treaty its consuls had sworn. The war then ran another seventeen years. What Rome took from it was practical. The manipular legion — smaller units able to fight on broken ground, in three lines with the oldest and steadiest at the back — is generally credited to this period and replaced the phalanx that could not manoeuvre in mountains. The Via Appia was begun in 312 BC to move armies south, and colonies were planted along it as garrisons. The third war from 298 BC brought the Samnites into a coalition with Etruscans, Umbrians and Gauls, which Rome broke at Sentinum in 295 BC in the largest battle fought in Italy to that date. The settlement afterwards absorbed the defeated as allies obliged to supply troops rather than tribute, which is the arrangement that beat Hannibal. The Samnites fought Rome again alongside Pyrrhus and again in the Social War of 91 BC, and Sulla destroyed them as a people in 82 BC. Their language survives in a few hundred inscriptions and their towns were never rebuilt.
- Year: 343 BCE
- Category: Military
