Much of the conflict which occurred between Romans and their neighbors at least in the regal period was probably not at the communal level, but rather raiding and reprisals by individuals and groups. However, conflicts originating in this way will often have involved the community, and, more generally, the pressures of warfare and the need to mobilize armies are likely to have stimulated state formation and the development of communal institutions. The community in its turn may have sought to control private violence, and an instance of this may be afforded by the ritual of the fetial priests. Accounts of their procedure for declaring war often specify that the demand presented was for the surrender of “the plunder and the plunderers,” and it seems likely that it originated as a communal response to private raiding, with the offenders’ community being required either to make good the offense by handing them over or to accept the responsibility collectively.
Aristocratic warlords, accompanied by a retinue of armed followers and moving quite freely between communities, are widely held to have been an important feature of the society of west central Italy in archaic times, and a striking body of evidence supports this view. Such warrior bands may have been a survival from the pre-state world, and parallels may be drawn with other pre-state societies such as Homeric Greece.13
The best attested warlords are three figures from the Etruscan city of Vulci, the brothers Caeles and Aulus Vibenna and their associate Mastarna, known both from Etruscan art, especially the reliefs of the late fourth-century Franyois tomb at Vulci, and from Roman tradition, according to which Caeles brought armed help to a Roman king and settled at Rome with his followers. The scholarly emperor Claudius reported an Etruscan claim that Mastarna had been king at Rome, and identified him with Servius Tullius. However that may be, the evidence does make it plausible to envisage the trio as Etruscan adventurers who intervened with an armed retinue in the affairs of Rome.
A band of comrades in allegiance to an elite leader also appears on a late sixth-or early fifth-century dedicatory inscription from Satricum (a site whose possession seems to have shifted between Latins and Volsci), usually translated as: “. . . the comrades (sodales) of Poplios Valesios set (this) up to Mamars.” “Mamars” is an alternative name for Mars, and “Poplios Valesios” is an archaic form of the name Publius Valerius. If the dedicators were from Rome, this Valerius may be the famous Publius Valerius Publicola, whom tradition represented as playing a leading part in the foundation of the republic. However that may be, the inscription is vivid testimony to the importance of sodalis-groupings in the region in archaic times, and the temptation is strong to view them as a warrior band.14
Further warlords followed the example of Mastarna and the Vibennae in intervening at Rome after the expulsion of the kings: Porsenna’s activity there is best interpreted in these terms, but the last reported attempt by a foreign adventurer to stage an armed coup at Rome, the Sabine Appius Herdonius’ seizure of the Capitol in 460, was an abject failure.
The movement of such adventurers between communities is in fact part of the well-documented wider phenomenon of elite migration between the states of west-central Italy in the archaic period. At Rome the reception of non-citizens as kings is only one instance of this process. Another is the admission of the Claudian gens: according to the traditional story, the Sabine leader Attus Clausus (Appius Claudius) came over to the Romans in 504 with a large retinue. Such movement will have taken place from as well as to Rome, as the case of Gnaeus Marcius Coriolanus illustrates. According to the legend, this Roman war hero’s opposition to the plebeians led to his exile from Rome; he joined the Volsci and led them on a campaign of conquest deep into Roman territory, ended only at the entreaty of his mother. This powerful tale was evidently developed in oral tradition before being embedded, with further accretions, in the historians’ account of the years 493-488. The story must have a kernel of truth, and, as Cornell has recently argued, this must include a Roman renegade who took service with the Volscians.15
A related development to the activities of aristocratic warlords is often thought to have been private wars by individual clans (gentes), conducted by the clan-members and their dependents and focusing on the defense and expansion of their landholdings. However, this hypothesis, like the view that the Roman army was originally composed of clan leaders and their retinues, rests on highly problematic assumptions about the role and importance of the gentes in early times.
The only evidence for a gens engaging in warfare on its own is the story of the disaster suffered by the Fabii at the Cremera (the Tiber tributary on which Veii itself stood) during the republic’s first war with Veii. According to most sources, in 479 some 306 Fabii manned a fort there accompanied (in some accounts) by 4,000 or 5,000 dependents, but in 477 they were ambushed, and only one Fabius survived. The episode has been much embellished, but must derive from an authentic memory of a Fabian disaster. It is often supposed that in reality the Fabii suffered their defeat while conducting a private war from their own landholdings, a late survival of independent gentilicial warfare. However, it is perhaps more likely that the disaster was, as the tradition claims, an episode in a public war. The Fabii, who were politically prominent at the time, could have undertaken the garrisoning of a raiding post which could not be maintained by the normal, short-term levy, perhaps an exceptional reversion to an older form of gentilicial levying. Alternatively, they may simply have suffered heavy losses in a regular battle, which is the version given by our earliest extant source, Diodorus (11.53.6).
World History
