towns should be assailed by the Lucanians, all should furnish contingents, and that the leaders of contingents which failed to appear should suffer the punishment of death.  But even the union of Magna Graecia no longer availed; for the ruler of Syracuse, Dionysius the Elder, made common cause with the Italians against his countrymen.  While Dionysius wrested from the fleets of Magna Graecia the mastery of the Italian seas, one Greek city after another was occupied or annihilated by the Italians.  In an incredibly short time the circle of flourishing cities was destroyed or laid desolate.  Only a few Greek settlements, such as Neapolis, succeeded with difficulty, and more by means of treaties than by force of arms, in preserving at least their existence and their nationality.  Tarentum alone remained thoroughly independent and powerful, maintaining its ground in consequence of its more remote position and its preparation for war—­the result of its constant conflicts with the Messapians.  Even that city, however, had constantly to fight for its existence with the Lucanians, and was compelled to seek for alliances and mercenaries in the mother-country of Greece.

About the period when Veii and the Pomptine plain came into the hands of Rome, the Samnite hordes were already in possession of all Lower Italy, with the exception of a few unconnected Greek colonies, and of the Apulo-Messapian coast.  The Greek Periplus, composed about 418, sets down the Samnites proper with their “five tongues” as reaching from the one sea to the other; and specifies the Campanians as adjoining them on the Tyrrhene sea to the north, and the Lucanians to the south, amongst whom in this instance, as often, the Bruttii are included, and who already had the whole coast apportioned among them from Paestum on the Tyrrhene, to Thurii on the Ionic sea.  In fact to one who compares the achievements of the two great nations of Italy, the Latins and the Samnites, before they came into contact, the career of conquest on the part of the latter appears far wider and more splendid than that of the former.  But the character of their conquests was essentially different.  From the fixed urban centre which Latium possessed in Rome the dominion of the Latin stock spread slowly on all sides, and lay within limits comparatively narrow; but it planted its foot firmly at every step, partly by founding fortified towns of the Roman type with the rights of dependent allies, partly by Romanizing the territory which it conquered.  It was otherwise with Samnium.  There was in its case no single leading community and therefore no policy of conquest.  While the conquest of the Veientine and Pomptine territories was for Rome a real enlargement of power, Samnium was weakened rather than strengthened by the rise of the Campanian cities and of the Lucanian and Bruttian confederacies; for every swarm, which had sought and found new settlements, thenceforward pursued a path of its own.