In one case, literary and archaeological evidence combine, a version of early Roman history rediscovered by the emperor Claudius from Etruscan sources being confirmed by the paintings of the François tomb at Vulci; the account known to Claudius and the paintings both deal with the adventures of Mastarna, the Etruscan name for Servius Tullius, the sixth king of Rome. This case serves to draw attention to what is perhaps the most serious loss for the historiography of the Roman Republic, the disappearance of the non-Roman tradition. Stray references enable us to perceive that apart from Etruscan, there were once Campanian, even Mamertine (see here) histories and numerous local traditions on which Cato (see here), when he wrote his history in the second century BC, was still able to draw. But that history has perished apart from fragments, and the view which our sources present us is almost wholly Romanocentric. It was not always so, and in writing the history of the Roman Republic one must remember that it is the history of Italy as well as of Rome.
BY THE TIME HANNIBAL invaded Italy in 218, the whole of the peninsula was under Roman control with the exception of the Po valley, inhabited by Gauls and known to the Romans as Cisalpine Gaul. Much of the process was already complete by 280, when Pyrrhus invaded Italy from Epirus; many of the crucial steps were taken in the years immediately following 338, the end of the last war between Rome and her immediate neighbours, the other cities which were like Rome of Latin race and language.
Before turning, however, to consider the process of the unification of Italy and the nature of Roman institutions (Ch. 3), it is important to have some understanding of the diverse elements which comprise the mixture which we call Roman Italy; this not only because these various elements each influenced Rome in the period when Rome was still a small city state, but also because all of them directly affected the nature of the eventual mixture.
It is for these reasons as well as because of the distinctive nature of certain Roman institutions that if any other power had united Italy the result would have been different; though, it must be said, the view that if the Samnites, for instance, had united Italy the result would have been federation rather than domination is merely the transposition to the ancient world of modern wishful thinking.
The three main groups involved are the people of the central Italian highlands, culturally on a level with or inferior to the Romans, but ethnically related and using a variety of Italic languages related to Latin; the Greeks of the south Italian colonies; and the Etruscans. These two were both culturally more advanced than Rome, but in varying degrees alien in race and language. The Gauls of the Po valley, culturally no more advanced than the Romans and of alien race and language were in due course in effect exterminated and their culture destroyed.
There is a further reason for spending some time on the non-Roman peoples of Italy. The Etruscans, to a certain extent, and the Greeks of the south to a much greater extent, both of them in contact with other areas of the Mediterranean world, provided for the expanding Republic avenues leading to involvement with that world.
The peoples of the central Italian highlands survive in the literary record chiefly as bitter and often successful opponents of the extension of Roman control; the most prominent group, the Samnites, provided in the Romanocentric eyes of Florus (1, 11, 8) material for twenty-four Roman triumphs. The Samnites lived, as recent archaeological work shows, in settled farmsteads, cultivating cereals as well as olives and vines; for despite their height and relative inaccessibility the Appennines include numerous pockets of agricultural land; the Samnites had few cattle, but many pigs and large flocks of sheep and goats, which were no doubt moved over short distances between summer pastures and winter pastures close to the farmsteads (a technique known as transhumance); both sheep and goats provided milk for cheese, wool, and whey for pig-food, as well as meat when killed at a ripe old age. The symbiotic relationship between plain and hill which transhumance involved was clearly widespread in Appennine Italy and no doubt supported a basically similar economy throughout.
Spreading outwards from the hills, partly by way of raids, but eventually with more serious intent, the peoples of the central Italian highlands were attracted by the fertile plains of Campania, just as the Volscians farther north were attracted by the plains of Latium; the Etruscan city of Capua (see below) fell in 423, the Greek city of Cumae in 421, a Greek element in the population surviving in the case of the latter. Neapolis (Naples) remained the only Greek city in Campania, though even there infiltration took place; the Greek cities of the south came similarly under pressure from the tribes of the hinterland. In the end, the hills were conquered by the plains, but at the turn of the fifth and fourth centuries BC it was by no means an obvious outcome.
Of the three groups of people whom I wish to discuss, the Greeks are on the whole the most straightforward. A variety of Greek cities had planted a string of self-governing foundations along the coasts of Italy and Sicily, beginning with Pithecusae (Ischia) about 775; the earliest of these colonies, as they are rather inappropriately described, was almost certainly intended to act as an entrepot for trade with Etruria; but its own foundation on the mainland opposite, Cumae, was an agricultural community, as were the vast majority of Greek colonies both in the west and elsewhere.
Greek colonization, invariably the venture of an organized community, involved the transfer of a developed society and culture, of its political organization, religious organization, language, monetary system; the colonial experience and contact with indigenous populations might eventually lead of course to considerable transformations.
But Magna Graecia, the collective name for the Greek cities in Italy and Sicily, was very much part of the Greek world, despite alleged Athenian ignorance of Sicily prior to the mounting of the great expedition of 415; men from the west participated in the great Greek festivals and their successes were celebrated by the Greek poet Pindar in the fifth century BC. In the fourth century Timoleon of Corinth set out to rescue Sicily from Carthage and, as we shall see, a succession of Greek condottieri attempted to help Tarentum (Taranto) in her wars with the tribes of the hinterland. The last of them Pyrrhus of Epirus, fought a full-scale war against Rome, by then the major threat.
The position of a Greek city overwhelmed by its barbarian neighbours is poignantly described in the case of Poseidonia (Paestum) by the near-contemporary Aristoxenus of Tarentum:
We act like the people of Poseidonia, who dwell on the Tyrrhenian Gulf. It so happened that although they had originally been Greeks, they were completely barbarized, becoming Tuscans; they changed their speech and their other practices, but they still celebrate one festival that is Greek to this day, wherein they gather together and recall those ancient words and institutions, and after bewailing them and weeping over them in one another’s presence they depart home (quoted by Athenaeus, XIV, 632a).
For most of the cities of Italy the effective choice lay between the barbarian tribes and Rome; it is not surprising that many of them chose Rome, a civilized community and in the eyes of some contemporary Greeks a Greek city; the process began with the survivors of the original population at Capua in 343 (see here), followed by the Greeks of Neapolis (Naples) in 326.
The Etruscans are sui generis and were so regarded in classical antiquity; it was a unique characteristic of their religion that it was centred on sacred writings that had supposedly emanated from supernatural sources, and they also claimed a special ability to discover the will of the gods by a variety of processes of divination. Furthermore, Etruscan society was