Roma VS Samnites!

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The worst enemy of Rome: the Samnites

Made up of different peoples, all from the interior, they lived in harsh, mountainous, hardly cultivable areas, infested with wolves and bears. Their territory, then as now, was the coldest in all of central and southern Italy. Cold temperatures and snow were the norm.

Brave and robust, the Samnites proceeded like this: once they entered foreign territory, they seized outlets on the sea or in the valleys, from which they attacked and raided the areas and cities below, ready to take refuge, in case of danger, on the mountains of 'internal. Having a territory devoid of coasts, the Samnites did not sail and traded little, they were a people of peasants and breeders, and their life was very hard and Spartan. They raised cattle, horses, poultry, goats and pigs, but above all sheep, for the production of milk and derivatives and for wool, and practiced transhumance.

Often in difficulty or oppressed by severe famine, to free themselves from such calamities they decided to consecrate young people to the God Mars, who were sent by their parents to look for other lands, occupy them with the task of raiding animals and goods to be sent home to help the people remained.

Very popular were the combat between gladiators, perhaps originated by the Samnites and imported to Rome. For a long time, in fact, the only type of gladiator known in Rome was the one called "Samnite". But originally the fights took place only on the occasion of funerals, as was the custom among the Etruscans.

The Samnites used both the javelin (pilum) and the long striped shield (scutum). The Romans adopted manipulative tactics and such weapons at the same time as the Samnites, at the beginning of the fourth century.

For protection they wore bodices on which three bronze discs were placed, on the right and on the left for the heart and stomach, one towards the central part of the sternum. Three more discs were placed on the back, all fastened together by a series of metal buckles that intersected the shoulders and under the armpits.

The officers' helmets were often decorated with plumes, sometimes with side openings where eagle feathers, very present in their territory, were fixed.

Often having to fight on mountainous territory, they did not use heavy armaments, which on the contrary had to be adapted to a flexible action. Using cavalry even on high ground implies that they had superlative training to guide animals in those places, taking into account that they rode bareback. In fact, the Samnite cavalry was highly regarded and feared. Later, it was used a lot by the Romans.

At the beginning, the Romans and Samnites, fearing a severe conflict, agreed not to clash and not to interfere with each other by looking for dominions in different directions, but the supremacy in southern Italy was always at stake. One of the two powers was to win and the other to die. The Romans and the Samnites knew it. The fight was only postponed.

A very serious episode for the Romans was the defeat after which they were forced to surrender, and their lives were saved, but on condition of passing unarmed under the yoke, an ignominious thing considered one of the worst setbacks suffered by the Roman people in the course of its history.

The three Samnite wars, all ended with the victory of the Romans, derived from the expansionist desires of the two civilizations which at that time were roughly equivalent militarily. The Romans already ruled over Lazio, northern Campania, over the Etruscan city of Veio and had made alliances with various other cities and smaller populations. But the Samnites dominated almost the rest of Campania and Molise, and tried to expand further along the coast, especially to grab Campania, a beautiful region with a wonderful climate.

The battle that decreed the end of the war was however that of Sentinum where the Romans won a coalition of 4 peoples: Samnites, Etruscans, Gauls and Umbrians.

Eventually the Samnites, exhausted by hunger and hardship, surrendered to the Romans, who in addition to the booty, demanded that the 7,000 Samnite warriors pass under the yoke of Roman weapons with only one garment on, more to avenge the humiliation suffered than for inflict a new one. Pontius son of Erennius, commander in chief of the Samnites, was also made to pass under the yoke together with the others, so that he expiated the humiliation inflicted on the Romans much earlier.

We do not know the conditions of the surrender, certainly the conditions had to be harsh for the Samnites, now forced into a very redimensioned and narrow territory on all sides by Roman colonies, even if, on the basis of the rather lenient conditions of the Romans, they were able to maintain a certain independence and the freedom to establish oneself as a league of peoples.

The Samnites, however, always maintained a certain hostility towards the Romans, siding against Rome in the Pyrrhic Wars (280-275 BC) and in the invasion of Hannibal in Italy (217-214 BC).

The revolts ended when the Romans granted them citizenship and the Samnites also integrated into the Roman ruling class.

The ability to read and write slowly spread over the course of the second and first centuries BC, due to the Romanization process that required the knowledge of Latin and arithmetic. Towards the first century. B.C. the Samnite people, like the other Italic peoples, were completely literate.

It was an extremely hard conflict, long years of battles and continuous guerrilla warfare in the mountains, but Rome came out victorious and above all aware of its value, of the spirit of the body and above all of the will to resist in the face of the enemy. It was an important training for the subsequent battle against the second great enemy of Rome: Carthage.