9b - South Italy in the fourth century B.C.

Summary

The fifteen decades which elapsed between the expedition to Sicily of the Athenians during the Peloponnesian War and the war between Pyrrhus of Epirus and the Romans are something of a heroic age in Italian history. It was a time of trial during which the success or failure of communities was constantly at stake, and in which the patterns of the preceding centuries were often obliterated and those which were to endure until the late imperial period formed. The trial took the form of almost unceasing warfare, confused by continuous changing of sides according to a mutable diplomacy and the exigencies of more or less mercenary manpower. Overall, the losers were the already ancient apoikiai, the city states of the Greek diaspora, whose champions, whether leaders from within the body politic or condottieri summoned from the east, all failed to establish their power sufficiently for either their descendants or their successors to share in it. The victory went to the Italic communities, whose elites in this period provided the forebears of long lines of city aristocrats whose tradition endured until the Roman empire. That such continuity came out of this period reminds us that it was no Dark Age. The victors were not usually in a position to despoil or obliterate completely; the fighting was not genocidal. This was partly because the warfare of the time was promoted and fuelled by background social and economic conditions which were tending, despite the dangers of the time, in positive directions: demographically, Italy was regarded at this time as a place with relatively abundant manpower, and the rewards of the integration of local production systems into Mediterranean-wide networks of distribution and consumption were becoming generally more palpable.