Last Campaigns in Samnium

While these events were passing, the war had not been suspended in Samnium.  The campaign of 443 was confined like the preceding to the besieging and storming of several strongholds of the Samnites; but in the next year the war took a more vigorous turn.  The dangerous position of Rullianus in Etruria, and the reports which spread as to the annihilation of the Roman army in the north, encouraged the Samnites to new exertions; the Roman consul Gaius Marcius Rutilus was vanquished by them and severely wounded in person.  But the sudden change in the aspect of matters in Etruria destroyed their newly kindled hopes.  Lucius Papirius Cursor again appeared at the head of the Roman troops sent against the Samnites, and again remained the victor in a great and decisive battle (445), in which the confederates had put forth their last energies.  The flower of their army—­the wearers of the striped tunics and golden shields, and the wearers of the white tunics and silver shields—­were there extirpated, and their splendid equipments thenceforth on festal occasions decorated the rows of shops along the Roman Forum.  Their distress was ever increasing; the struggle was becoming ever more hopeless.  In the following year (446) the Etruscans laid down their arms; and in the same year the last town of Campania which still adhered to the Samnites, Nuceria, simultaneously assailed on the part of the Romans by water and by land, surrendered under favourable conditions.  The Samnites found new allies in the Umbrians of northern, and in the Marsi and Paeligni of central, Italy, and numerous volunteers even from the Hernici joined their ranks; but movements which might have decidedly turned the scale against Rome, had the Etruscans still remained under arms, now simply augmented the results of the Roman victory without seriously adding to its difficulties.  The Umbrians, who gave signs of marching on Rome, were intercepted by Rullianus with the army of Samnium on the upper Tiber—­a step which the enfeebled Samnites were unable to prevent; and this sufficed to disperse the Umbrian levies.  The war once more returned to central Italy.  The Paeligni were conquered, as were also the Marsi; and, though the other Sabellian tribes remained nominally foes of Rome, in this quarter Samnium gradually came to stand practically alone.  But unexpected assistance came to them from the district of the Tiber.  The confederacy of the Hernici, called by the Romans to account for their countrymen found among the Samnite captives, now declared war against Rome (in 448)—­more doubtless from despair than from calculation.  Some of the more considerable Hernican communities from the first kept aloof from hostilities; but Anagnia, by far the most eminent of the Hernican cities, carried out this declaration of war.  In a military point of view the position of the Romans was undoubtedly rendered for the moment highly critical by this unexpected