standards against the community at their head, wherever they found armies in the field against Rome; but in 405 even the Latin federal assembly resolved to refuse to the Romans its contingent.  To all appearance a renewed rising of the whole Latin confederacy might be anticipated at no distant date; and at that very moment a collision was imminent with another Italian nation, which was able to encounter on equal terms the united strength of the Latin stock.  After the overthrow of the northern Volscians no considerable people in the first instance opposed the Romans in the south; their legions unchecked approached the Liris.  As early as 397 they had contended; successfully with the Privernates; and in 409 occupied Sora on the upper Liris.  Thus the Roman armies had reached the Samnite frontier; and the friendly alliance, which the two bravest and most powerful of the Italian nations concluded with each other in 400, was the sure token of an approaching struggle for the supremacy of Italy—­a struggle which threatened to become interwoven with the crisis within the Latin nation.

Conquests of the Samnites in the South of Italy

The Samnite nation, which, at the time of the expulsion of the Tarquins from Rome, had doubtless already been for a considerable period in possession of the hill-country which rises between the Apulian and Campanian plains and commands them both, had hitherto found its further advance impeded on the one side by the Daunians —­the power and prosperity of Arpi fall within this period—­on the other by the Greeks and Etruscans.  But the fall of the Etruscan power towards the end of the third, and the decline of the Greek colonies in the course of the fourth century, made room for them towards the west and south; and now one Samnite host after another marched down to, and even moved across, the south Italian seas.  They first made their appearance in the plain adjoining the bay, with which the name of the Campanians has been associated from the beginning of the fourth century; the Etruscans there were suppressed, and the Greeks were confined within narrower bounds; Capua was wrested from the former (330), Cumae from the latter (334).  About the same time, perhaps even earlier, the Lucanians appeared in Magna Graecia:  at the beginning of the fourth century they were involved in conflict with the people of Terina and Thurii; and a considerable time before 364 they had established themselves in the Greek Laus.  About this period their levy amounted to 30,000 infantry and 4000 cavalry.  Towards the end of the fourth century mention first occurs of the separate confederacy of the Bruttii,(19) who had detached themselves from the Lucanians—­not, like the other Sabellian stocks, as a colony, but through a quarrel —­and had become mixed up with many foreign elements.  The Greeks of Lower Italy tried to resist the pressure of the barbarians; the league of the Achaean cities was reconstructed in 361; and it was determined that, if any of the allied