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Updated: September 7, 2025
The Thurines, repeatedly assailed by Stenius Statilius the general of the Lucanians and reduced to extremities, applied for assistance against the Lucanians to the Roman senate just as formerly the Campanians had asked the aid of Rome against the Samnites and beyond doubt with a like sacrifice of their liberty and independence.
The Latins with the Campanians revolt; and ambassadors having been sent to the senate, they propose that, if they wished for peace, they should elect one of the consuls from among the Latins. Titus Manlius, the consul, put his son to death, because he had fought, though successfully, against the Latins, contrary to orders.
It is your duty, therefore, Campanians, to look upon this disaster which has been suffered as your own, and to consider that our common country must be protected. It is not a Samnite or Tuscan foe we are engaged with, so that the empire taken from us might still continue in Italy.
Every man ought thus to say to himself I am nominating a consul who is to cope with the general Hannibal. In the present year, at Capua, when Jubellius Taurea, the most expert horseman of the Campanians, gave a challenge, Claudius Asellus, the most expert among the Roman horsemen, was pitted against him.
But you made common cause with Mandonius and Indibilis, and intended also to have united your arms with them. They intended to have held Rhegium as a lasting settlement, as the Campanians held Capua, which they took from its ancient Tuscan inhabitants; and as the Mamertines held Messana in Sicily, without any design of commencing without provocation a war upon the Roman people or their allies.
The cavalry taking one of these each upon their horses, accustomed them to ride behind them, and to leap down nimbly when the signal was given. When, by daily practice, they appeared to be able to do this in an orderly manner, they advanced into the plain between the camp and the walls, against the cavalry of the Campanians, who stood there prepared for action.
That his reason for keeping them shut up within their walls was, that if any of these got out any where they roamed through the country like wild beasts, tearing and massacring whatever fell in their way. That some of them had deserted to Hannibal, others had gone and set fire to Rome; that the consul would find the traces of the villany of the Campanians in the half-burnt forum.
Capua, even then by no means favourable to military discipline, alienated from the memory of their country the affections of the soldiers, which were debauched by the supply of pleasures of all kinds; and schemes were being formed in winter-quarters for taking away Capua from the Campanians by the same kind of wickedness as that by which they had taken it from its original possessors: "and not undeservedly would they turn their own example against themselves.
We have already called attention to the fact that the southern Sabellian stocks, although at the outset in concert with the tyrants of Syracuse they crushed and destroyed the Hellenism of Magna Graecia, were at the same time affected by contact and mingling with the Greeks, so that some of them, such as the Bruttians and Nolans, adopted the Greek language by the side of their native tongue, and others, such as the Lucanians and a part of the Campanians, adopted at least Greek writing and Greek manners.
Though of that extraction, he was a Roman citizen, and by far the bravest horseman of all the Campanians, insomuch that when he served under the Roman banners, there was but one man, Claudius Asellus, a Roman, who rivalled him in his reputation as a horseman.
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