Samnite Confederation

A confederation of mountain peoples who beat Rome badly enough to be remembered for it, and were then erased with unusual thoroughness. The Samnites occupied the southern Apennines in four tribal groups joined in a loose federation, farming and herding on land that made them poor and excellent soldiers. Three wars with Rome ran from 343 to 290 BCE and consumed half a century. At the Caudine Forks in 321 BCE a Roman army was trapped in a defile and forced to surrender, its soldiers made to pass under a yoke of spears in a humiliation Rome never forgot and later repudiated. Samnite equipment - the oval scutum, the throwing spear, the manipular flexibility suited to broken ground - was substantially adopted by the Roman army that eventually defeated them. They joined Hannibal, and then rose again in the Social War and backed Rome's enemies in the civil wars, which is why Sulla treated the defeat at the Colline Gate in 82 BCE as a final settling, massacring prisoners and destroying towns. Their language, Oscan, survives in inscriptions. Roman gladiatorial armour types carried the name Samnite for centuries. Their territory covered much of modern Molise, Abruzzo and Campania. The Samnite federation had no capital city, which frustrated Roman attempts to end the wars by taking one. Pietrabbondante's theatre and temple complex is the best surviving Samnite site. Oscan was written in its own alphabet derived from Etruscan. Rome founded colonies along the roads it built through their land, including the Via Appia. Livy is the principal narrative source and wrote three centuries later.

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