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They perceived, when it was too late, that they had suffered themselves to be misled by a stratagem, and that the Samnites awaited them, not at Luceria, but in the fatal pass of Caudium. They fought, but without hope of success and without earnest aim; the Roman army was totally unable to manoeuvre and was completely vanquished without a struggle. The Roman generals offered to capitulate.
He now offered himself to the enemy's rage, and to torments; and was suffering, in atonement for the Roman people." While the state glowed with resentment and rancour, the levies were composed almost entirely of volunteers. New legions, composed of the former soldiers, were quickly formed, and an army marched to Caudium.
This year is followed by the convention of Caudium, so memorable on account of the misfortune of the Romans, the consuls being Titus Veturius Calvinus and Spurius Postumius. The Samnites had as their commander that year Caius Ponius, son to Herennius, born of a father most highly renowned for wisdom, and himself a consummate warrior and commander.
When all the members, extolling him with praises, expressed their approbation of his sentiments, a protest was attempted for a time by Lucius Livius and Quintus Maelius, tribunes of the commons, who said, that "the people could not be acquitted of the religious obligation by the consuls being given up, unless all things were restored to the Samnites in the same state in which they had been at Caudium; nor had they themselves deserved any punishment, for having, by becoming sureties to the peace, preserved the army of the Roman people; nor, finally, could they, being sacred and inviolable, be surrendered to the enemy or treated with violence."
The experienced arm of the old Rullianus was once more called into the field against them , and Gavius Pontius, a son perhaps of the victor of Caudium, even gained for his nation a last victory, which the Romans meanly enough avenged by causing him when subsequently taken to be executed in prison . But there was no further symptom of movement in Italy; for the war, which Falerii began in 461, scarcely deserves such a name.
The other way, and this the shorter by far, lay through the Passes of Caudium. Now the nature of these passes is this. There are two deep glens, narrow and grown with woods, having mountains on either side of them; and between these there is a plain, of no small extent, grassy and well watered, and the road passes through the midst of it.
The Ciminian forest was in those days deemed as impassable and frightful as the German forests have been in latter times; not even any trader having ever attempted to pass it. Hardly any, besides the general himself, showed boldness enough to enter it; the others had not the remembrance of the disaster at Caudium effaced from their mind.
Nola was abandoned by its allies; and the Romans had the sagacity to detach the town for ever from the Samnite party by a very favourable convention, similar to that concluded with Neapolis . Fregellae, which after the catastrophe of Caudium had fallen into the hands of the party adverse to Rome and had been their chief stronghold in the district on the Liris, finally fell in the eighth year after its occupation by the Samnites ; two hundred of the citizens, the chief members of the national party, were conveyed to Rome, and there openly beheaded in the Forum as an example and a warning to the patriots who were everywhere bestirring themselves.
Accordingly they returned unhurt from Caudium to the Roman camp, having acquitted, certainly, their own faith, and perhaps that of the public. The Samnites finding that instead of a peace which flattered their pride, the war was revived, and with the utmost inveteracy, not only felt, in their minds, a foreboding of all the consequences which ensued, but saw them, in a manner, before their eyes.
But the Samnites made demands which recalled the yoke of Caudium restitution of the spoil taken from the Samnites and of their prisoners and deserters, renunciation of the booty wrested by the Samnites from the Romans, the bestowal of the franchise on the Samnites themselves as well as on the Romans who had passed over to them.
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