Rape of the Sabine's By Romans

Rape of the Sabine’s by Romans

When Rome’s legendary cofounder, Romulus invited the chieftain and families of an Italic people known as the Sabines to a religious festival, he also invited a group of Latins. The Sabines lived in the central Apennine region of Italy, while the band of Latin’s were from the hilly farmland south of Rome. Once all were comfortable, Romulus ordered his army to abduct the Sabine women as described by the ancient Roman historian Livy. This action sparked years of warfare between Rome, the Latins and the Sabines. While modern historians cannot be certain of the accuracy of this tale of a dinner party gone wrong, the story does capture the contentious state of relations among the various groups vying for power on the Italian peninsula during the first millennium B.C. These earliest inhabitants of Rome came to realize, as Rome began to swell with immigrants and territorial ambitions, that central Italy was not large enough to accommodate one dominate people. It was a time however, also defined by cultural and artistic influences, all of which ultimately set the stage for the growth of Rome from a farming town of a few thousand people on the Tiber River to the largest empire of the western world.

Archaeologists working near Rome have found that early Italian states ebbed and expanded at each other’s expense for centuries. Sometimes Rome gained and sometime it lost ground. Roman expansion wasn’t a cultural zero-sum game. There were winners and losers on both sides. The surviving historical narratives tend to focus on militarized territorial expansion because republican Romans saw this as a worthy description. The archaeological record, however, suggest a more nuanced and socially complicated picture. Well before the Roman Empire extended from England to the Middle East, before the aqueducts and roads, before the Colosseum and gladiators, and even before the Roman army; Central Italy was a landscape filled with diverse tribes, each with its own identity, at least before they were subsumed by Rome.

Few places reveal the complexity of Rome’s neighbors better than the town of Satricum, which is forty miles south of Rome in the region known in antiquity as Latium, and is now Lazio. The archaeological record found there by four decades of excavation which has been conducted by Dutch teams from the University of Amsterdam tells a story of cultural interaction and affinities, war and peace. Excavations have also uncovered paved roads-some of the first in the region-suggesting Satricum played a role in the development of these public works long synonymous with Rome.

At a dig site carved out of a lush vineyard, the University of Amsterdam has been excavating evidence of the history of Satricum as it played out in Rome’s shadow. The original settlement dates back to the Iron Age, early in the first millennium B.C. Over the next five hundred years, Satricum grew into a bustling trading town of more than several thousand people, about the same size as Rome at the time. In those centuries, Satricum’s residents were Latins. They lived in what was called wattle-and-daub houses, often large and well-appointed with multiple rooms. They shared many cultural traits with the Etruscans, their neighbors to the north, and, like them, the Latins of Satricum prospered and developed a taste for trinkets imported from the east which had become available as a result of the newly developed Mediterranean’s flourishing trade ties. With an increasingly cosmopolitan outlook, they began building sturdy stone homes with red-tiled roofs, stocked with both imported and locally made pots, tools and adornments. Most significantly, Satricum was a place of devout worship, and pilgrims came from all around central Italy to visit and pay homage at Satricum’s temple to the goddess Mater Matura. At the same time, Rome’s cultural and political influence was beginning to be felt by all.

It remains unclear how much of Rome’s expansion was driven by war, as Livy’s histories claim, and how much by the more-or-less peaceful spread of cultural influences. An inscription carved in a stone building block suggest an intriguing hint about the relationship of Satricum and Rome. Found by the Dutch team the first week of their excavations at Satricum in 1977, the block contains the words “lei steterai popliosio valesiosio svodales mamartei,” roughly translated, “This is dedicated by the companions of Publius Valerius to Mars.” Mars was the Roman god of war and the words seemed to confirm the presence of Publius Valerius described by later Roman historians as one of the first consuls to assume power after the last king of Rome. Tarquinius Superbus, was overthrown in 509 B.C. and the Roman Republic was established. Because Publius Valerius appeared only in accounts written a few centuries later that he had actually existed. But the Satricum inscription, which likely graced a monument dedicated to the consul by his local supporters or henchman, provided proof, or at least the strong suggestion, that he was a historical figure. No other fragments of the inscription have been found, and it remains one of the few text of any kind from this period. Enough survives, though, to suggest, Satricum had political ties with Rome. The city which two centuries later, would swallow it up.

No matter what the relationship to Rome was in those early centuries. Satricum’s world crumbled around 488 B.C. when it was overrun by a tribe known as Volscian’s who descended from the hills to the south and east of Satricum. They occupied the town for at least 150 years, and may have used the town as a base with their intermittent wars with nearby Rome-until the Romans expelled them from Satricum and the surrounding lands in 346 B.C. Livy describes the Volscian’s as uncouth, warlike people from Lazio’s lowlands, semi-savages whose main role in history was to be crushed by Rome’s war machine. But the Volscian’s were missing from other texts and, so it seemed, from the physical record, until the 1980’s when Gnade and other Dutch archaeologists began finding tombs in Satricum barely six feet from Mater Matuta’s temple. There were an astounding 250 tombs dug around the same time containing the remains of men, women and children clothed in a hodge-podge of Latin, Greek, Etruscan, and unplaceable artifacts, some of which date from the centuries before the Volscian invasion. Those tombs clearly were not Latin or Roman, since neither would have buried their dead next to the holy shrine. “It was the Volscian’s. Here they were.” Says Gnade.

The Volscian’s do not, however, seem to have built houses in Satricum. Not a single residence from this period has been uncovered, only tombs. It could be that the Volscian settlement hasn’t yet been identified. But the Dutch speculate that they might have turned the once-thriving town into a giant cemetery. In any event, the Volscian presence ended abruptly, and Satricum, now dominated by Rome, began to regain its prosperity. Satricum had recovered from the quarrels of the beginning of the fifth and early fourth centuries B.C., during the Volscian period and the town was able to develop again into an important node in the commercial networks of the Mediterranean world.

Whatever its ties to Rome, Satricum’s defining characteristic in antiquity was that it was the location of the huge, pillared shrine to the Latin goddess Mater Matuta. This majestic temple stood for at least five centuries, beginning in the late seventh century B.C., on a hill in the center of the town. The shrine collapsed or was destroyed at the time of the Volscian occupation and was rebuilt on an even larger scale when the Romans took over after 346 B.C. Mater Matuta was later adopted as a goddess by the Romans.

Significantly, the shrine seems to have had a broader influence, playing an unexpected role in another form of appropriation on the part of Rome-high quality paved roads. The first paved roads in Satricum appear at roughly the same time as the construction of the first Mater Matuta temple in the late seventh century, B.C. The roads were necessary to bring people to the shrine and the people made Satricum important. Thus it is thought these early roads may have been intended, not for the transit of soldiers or for commerce, but instead for moving pilgrims who came to worship a gentle smiling goddess.

Centuries later, during Rome’s heyday, 29 major roads famously radiated out from the capital, carrying soldiers, goods, and ideas to the farthest reaches of the empire. New evidence suggests that the Romans seem to have acquired the technology for building smooth, durable thoroughfares much earlier than the second century A.D. from the Latins, and possibly from Satricum. The roads were excavated had deep bedding for drainage and erosion control, stone blocks were arranged on the sides of the roads and a hard surfaced made of quarried volcanic stone known as tufa. The roads were up to eighteen feet wide and were tough enough for chariots to pass over easily.

The Romans were not the first to build roads, it is known that the Greeks paved their roads, and the technique utilized were probably imported to Italy via Greek colonies on the southern Italian coasts. But one thing is certain according to experts, there is no parallel for this kind of road-making in early Italian culture.

October 26, 2018

Welby Thomas Cox, Jr., author

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