- Vincent Jolivet –
march against Rome, it does not sign in 308, together with Perugia and Cortona, a truce
of 30 years with the city; in 302 the great family of the Cilnii sought the intervention
of Rome to put down a slave revolt – a half-century earlier, under similar conditions, it
was the Tarquinian General Aulus Spurinna who had intervened to restore order (see Fig.
8.5). In 284, when the city is threatened by the Gauls, it is likewise the Roman army
that comes to the rescue.
From the late fourth century, the Roman army roamed freely in the territory of
internal and northern Etruria, easily accessible thanks to past alliances with Faliscans
and the Umbrians of Camerino and, from 299, with the founding of the colony of Narni:
one fi nds it in operations around Roselle (302), Volterra and Volsinii (298), Chiusi and
Perugia (295) and Volsinii and Roselle (294). This part of the conquest may be considered
completed with the capture in 264 of Velzna-Volsinii, on whose territory was the great
pan-Etruscan sanctuary, the Fanum Voltumnae (see Chapter 31): as at Arezzo, it was a slave
revolt that led to Roman intervention at the request of at least a part of its ruling class.
The destruction of the city, the plundering of its statues, the evocatio of its chief deity,
Voltumna, and the deportation of the survivors to the shores of Lake Bolsena, about eight
miles south-east, clearly showed the Roman determination to those Etruscan cities who
wanted to retain or regain their independence. That year, the triumph of Fulvius Flaccus
de Vulsiniensibus marks the end of all hope of independence of the Etruscan cities: in 259,
the Roman capture of the Etruscan colony of Aleria, occupied by the Carthaginians since
the beginning of the fi rst Punic War, and the destruction of Falerii, in 241, are the latest
episodes of this long history. All the Etruscan cities were now bound by a treaty with
Rome, but it was only in 90 with the lex Iulia, followed in 89 by the lex Plautia Papiria,
which put an end to the Social War, that their inhabitants became Roman citizens in
their own right.
A NEW TERRITORIAL FRAMEWORKThe Roman colonization of large parts of Etruscan territory that then became ager publicus
began just after the conquest of Tarquinia. During the fi rst half of the third century,
Rome founded a series of maritime colonies – small towns planned to accommodate some
300 peasant-soldiers and their families – along the Tyrrhenian coast, on land confi scated
from the Etruscans, in the territory of Caere (Castrum Novum, Pyrgi, Alsium and Fregenae,
between 286 and 245). In the territory of Vulci, at Cosa (273), was a colony under
Roman law inhabited by at least 2,500 families. The second major phase of colonization
is concentrated between 183 and 177, after the end of the second Punic War and the
early Roman conquest of the East, this time it concerns the territories of Vulci, with
Heba and Saturnia, Tarquinia with Gravisca, and Pisa, with Lucca and Luni. Several
other colonies were founded thereafter, especially at the end of the Republic, by Sulla,
Caesar or Octavian. The continued occupation of most sites, governed by a patchwork
of different laws (Roman or Latin colonies, municipia, praefecturae, fora etc.), the presence
of colonists on land sometimes depopulated by war against Rome, the Carthaginian and
Gallic invasions, and conscription, and the mingling among settlers individually (viritim)
or clustered in cities, have certainly been powerful factors in the Romanization of the
Etruscan territory, especially in the areas closest to Rome. But only in a few cases (from
Settefi nestre to Heba and Saturnia; at Florence and Lucca) was it possible to demonstrate
the presence of centuriation comparable to that attested in the rest of the peninsula.