This chapter treats the use of history in Oscan Campania in the Middle Republican period. While we have no written histories from the region at this time, by taking a broader understanding of “historical culture” I argue that we may still recognize complex and developing interests in recording and using the past on the part of Campanian elites. In particular, tomb paintings of the fourth and third centuries BCE show a radically new iconography that seems intended to convey real events. The pattern of cultural development in the region compares well with coeval trends at Rome. These affinities confirm that Rome’s own development toward written history by the Second Punic War should not be understood as uniquely Roman but as having formed a local expression of wider Italian cultural trends.

In imposing citizenship on the defeated Latins and Campanians following the Latin War, the senate’s principal object was not, as is sometimes asserted, to increase the number of recruits available for the Republic’s legions. Its aim, rather, was financial. Lengthy campaigns in Samnium were in prospect. These would require substantial increases in annual outlays for stipendium and other costs well above what had been usual when warfare had entailed briefer operations mainly within Latium. Those increases would in turn require significantly more tributum to be collected from the Republic’s assidui. The senators consequently faced a choice: they could greatly increase the tributum paid by each of the old citizens, or they could dramatically enlarge increase the number of tributum payers by turning many of the recently defeated Latins and Campanians into new citizens optimo iure or sine suffragio and thereby impose a lighter financial burden on each. The senate’s choice to distribute the greatly increased cost of future wars among many more assidui to a very great extent underwrote the long series of lengthy campaigns in Samnium and elsewhere after 338 that would gradually and inevitably establish Rome’s dominion over the Italian Peninsula.

A significant increase in agricultural production underpinned the many socioeconomic transformations that define first-millennium-BCE Italy. However, the farming regimes that underpinned this rise in surplus production, and its evolution through Republican times, are poorly defined. This lack of clarity is problematic, because cultivation and herding practices dictated the relative value of land versus labur. Without good archaeological data on this fundamental area of the Republican economy, we are ill-equipped to address central questions of land use, investment, and the motivation for territorial expansion in the Middle Republican period. This chapter argues for the importance of farming regimes as a force that shaped Roman social and economic history, and provides a first step towards an agroecology of the Roman expansion. It presents a new synthesis of archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological data integrated with wider evidence for agricultural processing and rural production. This analysis places bioarchaeological evidence for Republican farming in its peninsular context for the first time. Results indicate that production was motivated more by regional trajectories than by Roman annexation, and that rural settlement changes did not have a major immediate impact on the bioarchaeological data considered here. Lastly, we highlight key points of change alongside pathways for future research.

The chapter aims to illustrate the transformations that took place in the urban centers of Latium vetus during the 4th and 3th centuries BCE, the chronological period that includes the last, turbulent decades of the political autonomy of the cities of Latium and that sees, after the dissolution of the Latin League, the constitutional redefinition of the subjected communities and their inclusion in the political, military, and economic dynamics of Rome. At the same time, the chapter proposes to evaluate the role of Latin urban culture in the process of Roman expansion in Latium adiectum and in the wider colonial phenomenon: This shows extensive territorial reorganization and newly founded urban centers which are hardly “Roman” and are more related to or derived from the urban Latin tradition (for in terms of settlement principles, spatial organization, use of materials, and construction techniques). The communities of ancient Latium, in fact, must have had a primary role in the process of conquest and “Romanization” of the Peninsula, a process that because of its dynamics, its manifestations, and its outcomes, would be more correctly defined as “Latinization.”

This paper explores how the sociopolitical, economic, and demographic transformations of the Middle Republican period affected rural settlement and landscape exploitation in Central Tyrrhenian Italy. Two lines of archaeological inquiry are pursued. The first concerns settlement data from three major survey projects: the South Etruria Survey, Rome Suburbium Project, and Pontine Region Project. Despite local variation, these surveys highlight two general changes firmly placed in the late 4th and 3rd centuries BC: an increase in rural site numbers and the rise of specialized commercial farms. The second topic concerns centuriation. It is argued that some field systems, including the centuriation of the Pontine plain, were laid out in the late 4th and early 3rd centuries to reclaim marginal landscapes. Labor-cost analyses suggest such projects involved substantial and sustained investment. The chapter then discusses the implications of these rural transformations in relation to urban contexts and the period’s broader history. Despite continuous warfare, Central Italy apparently witnessed demographic and economic growth, which in turn contributed to Rome’s expansion.

This chapter seeks to consider the legal background and precedents for the developments of the Middle Republic, with a specific focus on the Twelve Tables. By thinking through what the Twelve Tables imply about the conditions of later sixth- and fifth-century Rome we can arrive at a clearer understanding of the fourth century, and a picture of considerable and long-term intellectual sophistication in Central Italy.

When assessing the evolution of the early Roman Republic, scholars typically designate a break between the fifth/fourth centuries and the end of the fourth century BCE/beginning of the third, based on political, legal, and military milestones. Archaeologists detect a similar break, as members of the new nobilitas turned to architecture as a vehicle for self-representation. Where most scholarship characterizes buildings and the broader cityscape as a reflection of political change, this chapter deploys theories of object agency and object-scapes to argue for their agency in effecting such change. Questioning whether Romans were conscious, at the time, of a new era dawning, I suggest that circumstantial evidence supports a hypothesis that, at least in the later Republic, they were.

This chapter considers the early stages of Roman slavery in Italy from a comparative perspective, drawing above all on the experience of slavery in the Sokoto caliphate in the nineteenth-century Sudan.

An underappreciated difference between fifth- and fourth-century Rome was the emergence of stipendium and tributum (military pay and the land tax to fund it). Encompassing every citizen landowner and soldier, stipendium and tributum likely involved more people than any other civic institution at Rome. Moreover, this fiscal system changed the way in which Rome operated. It created a set of tasks that needed to be completed; it then instituted a new set of roles to complete those tasks; then it elevated a set of people in order to fill those roles; and finally those people developed new tactics to derive maximum benefit from their new functions. The key stakeholders in all this were the tribuni aerarii, who operated the system in local areas across the countryside. Though poorly attested in the extant sources, these men had the ability to control the smooth operations of the war machine. They promptly realized that they could hold the fiscal system hostage to extract political concessions. The exclusive rule of Rome’s patrician leaders, now reliant on plebeians to pay and collect taxes, was doomed.