The Social War, 91 to 88 BCE

A History of the Italian Insurgency against the Roman Republic

Christopher J. Dart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317015482
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The Social War was a significant uprising against the Roman state by Rome's allies in Italy. The conflict lasted little more than two and a half years but it is widely recognised as having been immensely important in the unification of Roman Italy. Between 91 and 88 BCE a brutal campaign was waged but the ancient sources preserve scant information about the war. In turn, this has given rise to conflicting accounts of the war in modern scholarship and often contradictory interpretations. This book provides a new and comprehensive reassessment of the events surrounding the Social War, analysing both the long-term and the immediate context of the conflict and its causes. Critical to this study is discussion of the nexus of citizenship, political rights and land which dominated much of second century BCE politics. It provides a new chronological reconstruction of the conflict itself and analyses the strategies of both the Romans and the Italian insurgents. The work also assesses the repercussions of the Social War, investigating the legacy of the insurgency during the civil wars, and considers its role in reshaping Roman and Italian identity on the peninsula in the last decades of the Republic.

Chapter 1
The Modern Study of the Social War

In light of the importance of the Social War for understanding the broader issues of the evolution of Roman Italy it is no wonder that there has been a significant range of modern scholarship devoted to the conflict. The issues are diverse and, to some extent, vary depending upon the interpretation of the war adopted. Of all the issues associated with the Social War probably the most contentious and the most debated has been the question of the motivations and underlying goals of the Italian insurgents in the years leading up to the war and their aims during its actual hostilities. Similarly, despite the incredible importance of the conflict to the history of Roman Italy there remains a high level of disagreement about basic aspects of it. The result has been a considerable range of modern interpretations of the Social War and it is this vexed issue which is investigated in detail in this chapter. Obviously, given the significance of the war for the history of the late Roman Republic, many modern works discuss it in some respect and so this is not an expansive survey but rather a focused investigation of key works. This is followed in the next chapter by an investigation of ancient perspectives on the causes of the war.

Searching for the Origins of the Social War

Investigating the ‘origins’ of the Social War poses a fundamental problem to any study of it: the factors which led to the war and the aspirations of those who joined the insurgency in 91 are intimately connected with the general process of what is often termed Italian unification. Identifying the emergent needs of the Italian allies, the sources and reasons for their grievances in the decades prior to the war, assessing the fundamental goals of their political activities in 91 and their underlying intentions in going to war at the end of 91 are all issues central to forming a proper understanding of the Social War. In turn, the reaction of the allies (both those who had supported the insurgency and those who had remained loyal to Rome) to the extension of the Roman franchise in Italy in the wake of the war, and the involvement of former insurgent groups in the civil wars of the 80s and beyond, are important as they help to contextualise the intent of the insurgents during the Social War.¹ That these issues are also connected with the extension of Roman citizenship and with the changing status of allied communities on the Italian peninsula in the 90s immediately prior to the outbreak of the war can be reasonably asserted.² Certainly, citizenship was one of the demands made by some allied representatives prior to the war and, in turn, extension of the franchise was used by the Romans in a belated effort to dissuade still more allied communities from joining the insurgency in the latter part of 90 BCE and after. The general reluctance of Rome to extended the franchise to the Italian allies in the decades prior to the war and the apparent imperative to do so in the midst of the Social War signal a clear change in attitudes which the war triggered.

How and why these issues are related to the franchise question, however, has been the subject of wide-ranging modern debate. One common interpretation forwarded by modern scholars is that the insurgents retained their aim of securing Roman citizenship during the war. In stark contrast, some scholars, including most prominently Mouritsen, have argued that the allies came to seek a truly independent and distinct state from Rome. Between these two interpretations there is what might be reasonably termed a middle-ground position. This is found in (among others) Mommsen and Keaveney, where it is argued that an initial goal of citizenship transformed into a desire for an independent Italian state and that then, in the face of defeat, the insurgents accepted citizenship.

The Motives of the Insurgents

Any survey of the modern scholarship on the Social War will almost immediately reveal that there have been fundamentally different interpretations forwarded for what the insurgency hoped to achieve by going to war in the winter of 91/90 BCE. Indeed, the question of what factors drove some groups within the allies to demand enfranchisement in the period prior to the war and then subsequently what were the goals of the insurgency during the war are central to forming an understanding of the history of the insurgency as a whole. The complexities of these questions will be explored over the next two chapters but the question of Italian motivation and of understanding the underlying goals of the insurgents is an important and recurrent topic throughout this book.

While modern scholars have variously ascribed a wide range of potential goals to the Italian insurgency as it emerged during 91 BCE and then waged the Social War, the ancient literary sources are typically very definite that immediately prior to the war the Italian allies demanded Roman citizenship.³ Modern scholarship has been frequently divided as to how and why this desire emerged and why this should have translated into the daring but hazardous decision to make war upon Rome. Arguments put forward have included that those who joined the insurgency principally desired legal equality with Romans, that it was a means to secure protection from fickle Roman judicial decisions or indeed a reaction to progressive Roman encroachment in a multitude of aspects of the lives of allied Italians and their home communities. The emergence of such desires has been in turn explained as resulting from a breakdown of trust between Rome and the allied communities in the decades or even the century prior to the outbreak of the war.⁴ Roman citizenship would have in many of these cases alleviated a pre-existing ill. Other scholars have offered a more positive view of shared experiences in the provinces having triggered a desire for greater equity between Romans and allies.⁵ A related but distinct view is that the insurgents sought Roman citizenship and general enfranchisement as a means to future political participation.⁶ More radical arguments have suggested that they entertained hopes of achieving full independence from Rome or even that calls for citizenship and equality were motivated by quasi-nationalistic or pan-Italic sentiments.⁷

These modern views need not always be mutually exclusive and, indeed, some scholars have argued for goals which shifted over the course of the war.⁸ It should also be borne in mind that different groups within the insurgency may well have had distinct reasons for supporting it and consequently differing aspirations for what the war might achieve for them. Such debate has, however, contributed to a conflicting picture of the reasons behind the Italian uprising that occurred in 91 BCE.⁹ That the war was fought to determine the place of the insurgents, socially and politically within Italy, is, however, I believe widely accepted. How and why this desire emerged and then consequently whether the outbreak of the war represents a desperate bid to forcefully acquire citizenship and/or inclusion within the existing Roman Italy or, alternatively, a reaction against past failures and an attempt to establish a permanent independent state remains contentious.

Modern Scholarship

Many works have attempted to reconstruct from the limited and very fragmented ancient source material a coherent account of the Social War.¹⁰ A very early study was that of Prosper Merimée, whose Essai sur la guerre sociale was published in 1841. It was, however, Adolf Kiene’s Der römische Bundesgenossenkrieg, published in 1844, which was the first full narrative history of the Social War. In it Kiene both constructs an account of the war and presents an extended analysis of the long-term impacts of the war. Many features of Kiene’s work and his approach to the topic have been echoed in later works. Thus, for instance, Kiene (1844, pp. 182f) broke his account of the war during both 90 and 89 between a northern and southern front, presenting the consuls of 90 as directly opposed to the Italian commanders Poppaedius Silo in the north and Paapius Mutilus in the south. Similarly, Kiene recognised that there would have been long delays in the enrolment of the new citizens after the war and an even longer time before they would have been able to have an effect on the vote in Rome.

A number of modern scholars have argued to varying degrees that the insurgents in 91 were motivated by a desire to establish their own independent state or, indeed, to achieve total independence from Rome, and within this interpretation a wide range of conflicting theories and explanations have been offered. One such example is presented in Theodore Mommsen’s popular history Römische Geschichte. Mommsen’s history, first published in the 1850s, devoted significant attention to the Social War. Mommsen argued that the goals of the Italians shifted significantly once the war began.¹¹ He interpreted their pre-war stance as having been focused upon the acquisition of citizenship but that this had rapidly changed to fighting for independence from Rome. He viewed this shift in insurgent goals as having been marked by the Italians’ establishment of a confederate ‘capital’ at Corfinium, which they renamed Italia in Latin and Viteliú in Oscan. According to Mommsen, ‘the Italians now no longer thought of wresting equality of rights from the Romans, but proposed to annihilate or subdue them and to form a new state’ (1894, vol. 3, p. 505). It should be noted that central to such an argument is the inferred structure of the insurgent organisation established at Corfinium and it is here that two major issues occur. First, there is the question of the extent to which the insurgent organisation was indeed a full-fledged counter-state to Rome. Second is the question of how the Italians could have entertained any realistic hope that this state could survive the inevitable Roman response to its establishment. The problems associated with understanding the structure of this organisation will be discussed in detail in Chapter 5.

A number of subsequent works surveyed and investigated the surviving sources for the war. The first of these was the 1884 dissertation of Erich Marcks. In 1924 Alfred von Domaszewski produced an impressively concise thirty-one page monograph, Bellum Marsicum, which similarly sought to survey and organise much of the ancient source material for the war.¹² In both cases a major focus was the establishment of a chronological scheme to the problematic information provided by the ancient literary sources. In a substantial paper in 1947 Irmentraud Haug again surveyed the preserved literary sources, this time with an ostensible focus upon the lost books of Livy for the Social War but offering broad conclusions for the other sources as well.

During the Social War the rebel Italians minted their own coinage with which to pay their soldiers. These coins provide a vivid, albeit limited, window into the aspirations and message of the insurgency. They are the only direct contemporary evidence of how the insurgents sought to present themselves and have long been recognised as therefore important as the only uniquely rebel Italian perspective on the conflict which has been preserved. Irrespective of the extent to which the writers of the surviving ancient literary sources may have been sympathetic to allied Italian grievances, most of the sources were produced by the generations after the war. The study of these coins has a long history with works specifically devoted to their study including Henri Bompois’ survey, published in 1873. In 1987 Alberto Campana published the major corpus of the coinage of the insurgency along with the most detailed discussion and interpretation of its related issues. In addition to these there are the many general catalogues which contain sections devoted to the Italian issues. In particular are Jean Bebelon’s catalogue of the De Luynes numismatic collection at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, which contains a section representing the main examples of the coins issued, including the highly questionable gold ‘cista mystica’ stater (Bompois, 1873, pp. 10–15), Gruber’s important survey (1970) based upon the British Museum collection, and the relevant sections of both Sydenham’s (1952) and Crawford’s (1974) compilations of Republican coinage. Added to these, there has also recently appeared a new survey in Imagines Italicae.¹³ Much of this work has illustrated the different ways in which the sequence of the coinage can be reconstructed and, in turn, the significant implications for understanding their potential messages. These works also demonstrate the problems associated with assessing a rich set of numismatic examples that were created in a very narrow time frame (see for examples Voirol, 1954; Buttrey, 1973; Pobjoy, 2000; Tataranni, 2005; Tweedie 2008).

A particularly distinctive interpretation of the Italian insurgents’ motives was presented by Gaetano De Sanctis. Although not published as a monograph until 1976, it would have formed part of his planned but never completed fifth volume of Storia dei Romani and has often been overlooked. The work briefly relates the major events of the war, closely following the literary source material on a number of points. De Sanctis quite emphatically argued that the Italians’ aim in the war was a national state based upon what he saw as a common history, interests, culture and geography in Italy. He suggested that the insurgents desired a single territorial state for Italy, a desire which could be achieved through citizenship or war, whether the capital were to be Rome or Italia/Corfinium.¹⁴ Applying De Sanctis’ interpretation, the demands of the allies in the years prior to the war...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The Modern Study of the Social War
• 2 Ancient Perspectives on the Social War
• 3 Italians and the Roman State in the Second Century BCE
• 4 Livius Drusus, Poppaedius Silo and the Looming Conflict (91 BCE)
• 5 The Outbreak of the War (91 to 90 BCE)
• 6 The War in Italy (90 BCE)
• 7 The Collapse of the Italian Insurgency (89 to 88 BCE)
• 8 The Lex Iulia, Lex Plautia Papiria and Enfranchisement (90 to 88 BCE)
• 9 Ongoing Conflicts and Enfranchisement (88 to 70 BCE)
• Conclusions
• Appendix 1 Important Legislation
• Appendix 2 Roman and Italian Commanders
• Appendix 3 Cities Besieged during the Social War
• Appendix 4 Examples of Enfranchised Individuals
• Bibliography
• Index