been a clear turning point: an almost general shipwreck of the pre-Roman cultures,
including their cults; abuse of power, even acts of sacrilege by the Roman generals
in the sanctuaries of the allies; then, after the Social War, and especially from the
beginnings of the principate, the introduction in the new municipiaand colonies of
an enlarged, renewed pantheon: the Roman gods and diui(divinized emperors) appear,
next to a few large local sanctuaries, which would have been allowed to remain, even
favored because of their power of attraction. An exemplary case for this new reli-
gious framework is the lucus Feroniae, noted above. The ancient sacred grove was
the site for the foundation of a colony in the second half of the first century bc, the
colonia Iulia Felix Lucoferonensium. We know little about the topography of the old
sanctuary: the archaeological data are primarily reduced to a deposit of anatomical
statuettes, ex-votos, and inscriptions. On the other hand, on the axis of the forum,
opposite to a prostyle temple, an exedra was built, which included a beautiful series
of statues of members of the imperial house (domus diuina) (Sgubini Moretti
1982/4). In addition, hardly 800 meters from there, the luxurious villa of Volusii
Saturnini(first century bcto first centuryad) was built. On the whole, through
the eyes of the modern visitor at least, the panorama of the small urban center, the
statues of diui, a great senatorial domain, are much more visible than the old sanc-
tuary of Feronia. But isn’t this an effect of the remaining archaeological data, which
we must remind ourselves is only partial and influenced by previous excavations?
It was precisely the increase in recent field investigations that led to a question-
ing of the idea of a drastic rupture. This gloomy vision was already partly shared
by contemporaries, as can be illustrated by the disillusioned reflections of Strabo (6.1.2):
“The Leucani...and the Brettii, and the Samnites themselves... have so utterly
deteriorated that it is difficult even to distinguish their several settlements; and the
reason is that no common organization longer endures in any one of the separate
tribes; and their characteristic differences in language, armor, dress and the like, have
completely disappeared.” Strabo also adds that the effort to push the ethnological
investigation further is not worth it, since the Italics from his time on, for example
Leucani or Campanians, “are Campanians only by name and Romans in fact; they
have become Romans.” In modern historiography, it is the famous work of A. J.
Toynbee, Hannibal’s Legacy(1965), which strongly stressed the concept of Italian
“desert” (solitudo) starting from the second century bc: an annihilation of Italian
identities in all respects, which would have affected more especially the south and
the inner zones, and would have been the combined effect of the Roman conquest
of the peninsula, the Second Punic War, and the subsequent confiscations.
Toynbee’s great book has been the object of several recent reappraisals. It is espe-
cially, as I said, the decisive contributions of archaeology and epigraphy which have
made it possible to make progress by increasingly more regional investigations. In
Lucania, it is true that the majority of the small places of cult around the Greek
cities and the indigenous settlements of the interior disappear during the Hellenistic
period, but not necessarily (as has generally been thought) around 273–272 bc(as
deduced from the Latin colony of Paestum, the conquest of Taranto: emblematic
dates of the “end” of Magna Graecia). Some of them continue to be attended in
the second century bc(Serra Lustrante d’Armento, Civita di Tricarico: de Cazanove54 Olivier de CazanoveACTC04 25/04/2007 09:26 AM Page 54