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Back he comes after four years, victorious, fighting his way right and left, against Lucanians and Samnites, back to Rome still fighting them, almost loses the battle, is saved by Crassus to take vengeance again, and again the long lists of the proscribed are written out and hung up in the Forum, and the city runs blood in a third Terror.
Among the Lucanians, the consul, Sempronius, fought several small battles, but none worthy of being recorded, he also took several inconsiderable towns.
Hitherto the weak Roman army had with difficulty maintained itself in Thurii against the Lucanians and Bruttians; but now the consul Gaius Fabricius Luscinus appeared with a strong army in front of the town, relieved it, defeated the Lucanians in a great engagement, and took their general Statilius prisoner.
This was one reason why Tarentum, the rich and prosperous Dorian city on the Tarentine Gulf, had been a spectator of the contest in which it had abundant occasion to feel a deep interest. Rome had given up to the Lucanians the non-Dorian Greek cities in that region.
Thus abandoned by their general, and at the same time deprived of their allies in central Italy, the Tarentines and their Italian allies, the Lucanians and Sallentines, had now no course left but to solicit an accommodation with Rome, which appears to have been granted on tolerable terms.
Under these circumstances it was no light undertaking for the Tarentine republic to take part in the conflict between Rome and Samnium, even apart from the at least troublesome feud in which Roman policy had contrived to involve them with the Lucanians.
About this period their levy amounted to 30,000 infantry and 4000 cavalry. Towards the end of the fourth century mention first occurs of the separate confederacy of the Bruttii, who had detached themselves from the Lucanians not, like the other Sabellian stocks, as a colony, but through a quarrel and had become mixed up with many foreign elements.
We have already observed that the Roman coins held a certain ratio to silver by weight; on the other hand we find those of the east coast of Italy placed in a definite proportional relation to the silver coins which were current from an early period in southern Italy, and the standard of which was adopted by the Italian immigrants, such as the Bruttians, Lucanians, and Nolans, by the Latin colonies in that quarter, such as Cales and Suessa, and even by the Romans themselves for their possessions in Lower Italy.
These Campanians could see no reason why a band of mercenaries should not seize on their own behalf any city entrusted to their guardianship, provided only they were in a position to hold it the Samnites had established their dominion in Capua itself, and the Lucanians in a succession of Greek cities, after a fashion not much more honourable. Mammertines
Alliance between the Romans and Lucanians A still more important success befell the Romans in Lucania.
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