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Updated: May 8, 2025
It is a significant indication of the state of feeling, that the Samnite government informed the Roman envoys that it was not able to guarantee their inviolability, if they should set foot on Samnite ground. The war thus began anew , and while a second army was fighting in Etruria, the main Roman army traversed Samnium and compelled the Lucanians to make peace and send hostages to Rome.
In the beginning of this year, ambassadors came from the Lucanians to the new consuls to complain, that "the Samnites, finding that they could not, by any offers, tempt them to take part in the war, had marched an army in a hostile manner into their country, and were now laying it waste, and forcing them into a war; that the Lucanian people had on former occasions erred enough and more than enough; that their minds were so firmly fixed that they thought it more endurable to bear and suffer every hardship, rather than ever again to outrage the Roman name: they besought the senate to take the people of Lucania into their protection, and defend them from the injustice and outrage of the Samnites; that although fidelity on their part to the Romans would now become necessary, a war being undertaken against the Samnites, still they were ready to give hostages."
He now hoped that under the first impression made by the great battle on the Romans he should be able to secure the freedom of the Greek towns in Italy, and to call into existence between them and Rome a series of states of the second and third order as dependent allies of the new Greek power; for such was the tenor of his demands: the release of all Greek towns and therefore of the Campanian and Lucanian towns in particular from allegiance to Rome, and restitution of the territory taken from the Samnites, Daunians, Lucanians, and Bruttians, or in other words especially the surrender of Luceria and Venusia.
In the campaign of 477 a desultory warfare was carried on in Samnium, where an attack thoughtlessly made on some entrenched heights cost the Romans many lives, and thereafter in southern Italy, where the Lucanians and Bruttians were defeated.
I do not think that even the Romans could have successfully resisted Alexander the Great; tho it is certain that he never throughout all his long marches encountered such enemies as they, nor even such as Samnites and Lucanians combining courage, patriotism, discipline, with effective arms both for defense and for close combat.
The Tarentines obtained from Rome, presumably on the intercession of their emigrants, the restoration of autonomy; but their arms and ships had to be given up and their walls had to be pulled down. Submission of Lower Italy In the same year, in which Tarentum became Roman, the Samnites, Lucanians, and Bruttians finally submitted.
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.
For the Tarentines having, for a considerable time, buoyed up the state of Palæpolis with delusive hopes of assistance, when they understood that the Romans had gotten possession of that city, as if they were the persons who had suffered the disappointment, and not the authors of it, they inveighed against the Palæpolitans, and became furious in their anger and malice towards the Romans; on this account also, because information was brought that the Lucanians and Apulians had submitted to the Roman people; for a treaty of alliance had been this year concluded with both these nations.
A Roman army under the praetor Marcus Valerius had taken position at Luceria, partly that it might, in connection with the Roman fleet, watch the east coast and the movements of the Macedonians; partly that it might, in connection with the army of Nola, levy contributions on the revolted Samnites, Lucanians, and Hirpini.
When Alexander the Great passed with his army into Asia, his brother-in-law and uncle, Alexander of Epirus, came with another army into Italy, being invited thither by the banished Lucanians, who gave him to believe that, with their aid, he might get possession of the whole of that country.
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