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The Vandals repeatedly visited the coasts of Spain, Liguria, Tuscany, Campania, Lucania, Bruttium, Apulia, Calabria, Venetia, Dalmatia, Epirus, Greece, and Sicily: they were tempted to subdue the Island of Sardinia, so advantageously placed in the centre of the Mediterranean; and their arms spread desolation, or terror, from the columns of Hercules to the mouth of the Nile.
The aspect of Italy would have appeared to him of a quite different nature from that of India, which he traversed in the guise of a traveller, at the head of a crew of drunkards, if he had seen the forests of Apulia, and the mountains of Lucania, with the vestiges of the disasters of his house, and where his uncle Alexander, king of Epirus, had been lately cut off.
The victory of Cannæ brought to the Carthaginians other auxiliaries; a crowd of men from Campania, Lucania, Brutium, and Apulia, filled his camp; but it was not that warlike race which he formerly recruited on the banks of the Po.
They made, it is said, a treaty with Mithridates; but long before that king could have reached Italy, if he had been able to make the attempt, there would have been no allies to support him. In Lucania Aulus Gabinius, made rash by some successes, assaulted the confederate camp, but was repulsed and slain.
Think of the time when the Lucania shall have fallen behind in the race, and shall be plying to Boston or Philadelphia, while larger and swifter hotel-ships shall put forth almost daily from Liverpool, Southampton, and New York! Think of the growth of intercourse which even the next ten years will probably bring, and the increase of mutual comprehension involved in it!
Five years had scarce elapsed since the contest ended, and all the wounds must still have been bleeding which the twenty-two years' war had inflicted on the peasantry of Samnium, when in the year 456 the Samnite confederacy renewed the struggle. The last war had been decided in favour of Rome mainly through the alliance of Lucania with the Romans and the consequent standing aloof of Tarentum.
Instead of five, eight thousand men were given him, half Romans, half allies. He himself also got together a considerable number of volunteers, in the country, on his march; and having almost doubled his force, arrived in Lucania, where Hannibal had halted after having in vain pursued Claudius.
This evening other guests sat at the abbot's table, and he shrank from their notice, for though they were but men of humble estate, pilgrims from Lucania, he felt debased before them. The reading, to which all listened during their meal, was selected from that new volume of Cassiodorus so esteemed by the abbot; it closed with a prayer in which Basil found the very utterance his soul needed.
But, in addition to the disaster sustained in Lucania, the army also of volunteer slaves, who had served during the life of Gracchus with the greatest fidelity, as if discharged from service by the death of their general, left their standards.
The Romans themselves, on the other hand, had raised a very large force, and had sent it forward in two divisions, under the command of the two consuls. These two divisions took different routes; one passing to the north, through the province of Samnium, and the other to the south, through Lucania both, however, leading toward Tarentum. Pyrrhus divided his forces also into two parts.
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