In 340 BC, an uprising of the Latins provided Rome with the opportunity to establish her power over Latium on a permanent basis. After a brief war, the Latins in 338 BC were forced to accept a peace in which the Latin League was liquidated and replaced by bilateral treaties between Rome and those few Latin cities that were allowed to remain nominally independent; this was the principle of divide and rule in action. Most of the cities of Latium were annexed by Rome, sometimes with full Roman citizenship for their inhabitants, sometimes with a reduced form of citizenship. The latter was in the following years extended to cities in Campania that were allied with Rome, such as Capua. The expansion of Roman influence in Campania brought Rome into conflict with the Samnites, the most numerous of the Italian mountain peoples that were constantly pressing on to the coastal plains and were on the lookout for further expansion toward the Tyrrhenian Sea. In 326 BC, a war broke out that Rome won only with considerable effort. The peace, shortly before 300 BC, brought the whole of Campania and parts of the Apennine mountains into Roman hands. In the meantime and with the requirements of warfare in mind, the Romans had constructed the first of their military roads, the via Appia—named after the censor Appius Claudius who had commissioned the work—from Rome to Capua.
In this period, Rome succeeded in largely solving her internal problems as well. Since the consulate and the new magistracies of praetor and censor had been opened up for plebeians in 367 BC and the following years, a mixed plebeian-patrician elite had emerged: the nobilitas. This aristocracy of office continued the policy of territorial expansion, so that by distribution of land in newly acquired areas, the demands of the poorer plebeians could also be met. Thus, there was a clear connection between the winding down of the “Struggle of the Orders” in Rome and Roman expansion in Italy. The political emancipation of the plebeians came to a close with the lex Hortensia of 287 BC, which made decisions of the assembly of the plebs—in fact, an alternative assembly of the people—automatically binding for everyone; in other words, a plebiscite henceforth had the force of law. With that, in 287 BC, a period began that has been called the classical Republic, because internal peace was mostly maintained, a period that would last until 133 BC, when civil strife would break out in new and more embittered forms.
Not long after 300 BC, the growing power of Rome resulted in the formation of a grand alliance against her of Samnites, Umbrians, Etruscans, and Gauls. In the battle of Sentinum in Umbria in 295 BC, this coalition, however, was decisively defeated, which sealed the fate of Italy. In the following years, Rome concluded separate treaties with the different peoples involved, after which she was truly the mistress of the whole of Italy from the river Po down to the straits between Italy and Sicily. Only the Greek city of Tarent in the far south retained, with a few allied cities, its independence. To protect itself against Rome, it concluded an alliance with Pyrrhus, the king of Epirus in northwestern Greece, an ambitious monarch who imagined himself to be a second Alexander conquering the west. In 280 BC, he crossed over to Italy. Initially, he managed to beat the Romans twice, but after the second of these hard-won “pyrrhic victories” he offered peace, which Rome rejected. A third battle thereupon ended undecided, after which the king returned to Greece in 275 BC. Three years later, Tarent submitted to Rome. By and large, from 270 BC on, the whole of Italy was under the dominion of Rome. Roughly a quarter of its territory directly belonged to Rome, and the rest belonged to states that were bound to the dominant city in bilateral alliances. By this time, Rome also started to mint her own silver coins and so broke away from a more primitive past in this respect as well. During the war with Tarent and Pyrrhus, Rome concluded treaties with Egypt under king Ptolemy II and with Carthage. The Roman state thus made its entrance into the world of the Hellenistic great powers.
World History
