X. 326-304 B.C. make. It is reported that the two consuls marched CHAP. through the enemy's country for five months, plundering and devastating it.' The consul Marcius celebrated a magnificent triumph, and an equestrian statue was erected to him on the Forum. The relations of Rome to the Hernicans were placed on a new footing. Those towns which had remained faithful kept their own constitution and independence; the other Hernicans came into the dependent position of Roman citizens without the suffragethat is, they became subjects of the Roman people, obliged to pay taxes and to serve in the army, without any share in the honours and advantages of citizenship. Even in the management of their local affairs they were limited, and every kind of political connexion with one another was taken from the separate communities. Thus the Hernicans, like the Latins a generation before, became the subjects of Rome, and Roman power became more centralized and stronger. invasion of We might now expect to see the Samnites completely Samnite exhausted and resigned to submit to Rome; but either Campania. the reports of the Roman victories and the devastation of Samnium by the consuls Cornelius and Marcius in the year 306 B.c. are very much exaggerated, or despair and misery drove the Samnites out of their desolated country to exercise their revenge and to search for the means of livelihood. In short, we read of an incursion which they made in the following year into Campania. It also appears that several Roman fortresses fell again into their hands, probably at the time of the defeat of the Hernicans, through the treachery of Hernican garrisons; for it is related that, in the year 305 B.C., Sora, Arpinum, and Cesennia were again taken from the Samnites.2 In the campaign of this year they fought with their old courage, and not without success; for, according to the reports of some annalists, the consul Postumius, after some indecisive engagements, Diodorus, xx. 80. 2 Livy, ix. 44. Again we hear of the retaking of towns, without having previously been informed how and when they were lost. See above, p. 406, note 4. BOOK III. B.C. retired under cover of night to the mountains. Afterwards, when he was joined by his colleague, Minucius, he suc326-304 ceeded in defeating the Samnites, taking prisoner their general Statius Gellius, and conquering the important town of Bovianum. This last feat of arms does not seem to have amounted to much, if, as is related, it was the third time that Bovianum fell into the hands of the Romans. Be that as it may, the Samnites were by no means subdued. They were only thrown back into their own country. Their conquests beyond Samnium were taken from them, and a barrier was erected against their further plans of conquest and predatory excursions into Campania, Apulia, and the other neighbouring countries, where they were dreaded and hated as dangerous neighbours. But they remained a free people in their own mountains. They concluded at last, after a long and chequered war, an honourable peace with Rome, by which they were left in possession of their independence, standing as a nation on an equal footing with Rcme.1 End of the second Samnite war. Thus ended the longest and most trying war which the republic had ever undertaken. It had lasted for twentytwo years, and had been carried on by both nations with equal courage and perseverance. Victory was on the side of the Romans, not because they had more courage, determination, or higher military qualities, but because their conduct of the war was more systematic, because by their plan of fortified colonies they maintained their hold of the territory they had conquered, and because by the superior diplomatic skill of the senate they secured the friendship of the neighbours of the Samnites. This superiority had its root in the strong, centralised government of the Roman state, in the calm firmness and wisdom with which the Roman senate conducted its foreign policy, and in the unbroken determination with which the Romans, now as ever, kept a proposed object steadily in view. Livy, ix. 45: Foedus antiquum Samnitibus redditum.' Niebuhr (Röm. Gesch., iii. 304; English translation, iii. 259) is of opinion that the Samnites had to acknowledge the supremacy of Rome. Arnold (Hist. of Rome, ii. 264), as usual, agrees with Niebuhr. CHAP. X. B.C. The final result of the war, although it did not bring about the subjection of the Samnites, was in the highest degree favourable for the extension and consolidation of 326-304 the Roman power. The Latins, who at the outbreak of Results of the war had changed their condition of allies for that of the war. subjects, became one people with the Romans during the twenty-two years of companionship in arms. Whatever was left of rancour and opposition to Roman supremacy died out. Before the end of the war the Hernicans too, like the Latins, had become Romans. The number of Roman citizens had considerably increased, in spite of all the losses in war. Four new tribes were added to the twenty-seven older ones, and eight colonies, sent out in rapid succession, prepared the change of the old Volscian country into Roman territory, while the permanent possession of Campania was quite secured by the immigration of a great number of Roman citizens, and by the different degrees of dependence in which the Campanian towns stood to Rome. Roman influence now penetrated the whole of central and southern Italy, and had for the first time made itself felt in several Greek towns. Rome had become beyond all dispute the first power in Italy; and no people could dare from this time forward, singlehanded, to oppose the conquerors of the Samnites. CHAPTER XI. INTERNAL HISTORY TILL THE HORTENSIAN LAWS. BOOK 339-286 B.C. and NEARLY a whole generation had passed away since the admission of the plebeians to the consulship by the Licinian laws (366 B.C.) when, by the Publilian laws (339 B.C.), the last remaining purely political offices of censor Change in the rela- and prætor were shared with the plebeians. Now at tive position of last, by the Publilian legislation, the old struggle between patricians the patricians and plebeians was brought to an end, after plebeians. it had for nearly two hundred years determined the march of reform, and regulated the internal political life of the Roman people. Nothing now survived of patrician privileges but the priestly offices, which could be left the more easily in the possession of the ancient families, as they conferred no political influence in Rome, but were entirely subordinate to the secular authority of the state. Thus the old contrast had disappeared. Whatever traces were left after this time of patrician pretensions, of patrician arrogance and conceit, we may regard as only the faint echo of a storm which has passed by, which terrifies nobody and deserves not to be noticed or heeded. There were not wanting in Rome a number of men, who from obstinacy, narrow-mindedness, or dulness were closed to all new impressions and convictions, and went down to their graves with all their old feelings and ideas, after a new state of things had sprung up around them.1 The old and the The proud old patricians had not nearly given up the 'There were Jacobites in England long after the English nation had forgotten the Stuarts. New XI. B.C. hope of conquest when the dissolution and decomposition CHAP. of their body had already begun at the core. Being unable, by its nature, to receive new members, the patri- 339-286 ciate was doomed gradually to melt away, by a natural law, which would have operated even without the concurrence nobility. of external circumstances, such as the frequent wars, to which the patricians sent more than their due proportion of combatants. The time was long past when the claims of the patricians to be considered the Roman nation appeared to be justified by the fact. Since the reception of the plebs into the comitia of centuries, the Roman people (the populus Romanus) was composed of the two classes, and it was in the nature of things that the plebeians, who received a constant accession of members from without, should increase in the same proportion as the patricians diminished in numbers. The original patrician people shrunk to a patrician nobility, and from this cause alone were obliged to give up the hope of preserving their old prerogative. At the same time, there arose by degrees a plebeian nobility, and even before the Canuleian law promoted the amalgamation of this new nobility with the old one by legalising marriage between the two, a process had already begun by which a number of plebeian families raised themselves to eminence above their fellow-plebeians, and formed, in connexion with the old patrician families, a new privileged class, the nobility' properly so-called. After the complete equalisation of the plebeians with the patricians in all private and public rights, this new nobility acquired more ground and a firmer organisation. It was not like that of the old patricians, limited to a certain number of families, and transmitted only by descent from these families, but it was recruited continually by those families from which the people chose the high officers of state. It was, therefore, essentially a nobility of office conferred by the people, and it was made hereditary by the solid organisation of the Roman family. If we employ the term 'nobility' to distinguish these new nobles from the old patricians, we must not forget that as |