as a representative symbol for the allies as a whole, although attempts have been
made to see the hind as a symbol of Celtism in Italy. Even if this were true, it would
be still only be the identifying animal of the Gauls, not of the Samnites. The opposi-
tion between the animal of Mars and the animal of Diana perhaps better recalls the
old antagonism between Romans and Latins.
The account of the battle of Sentinum brings up a few things about the various
people who faced the Romans, but nothing about their religion. The omen, in spite
of all appearances, is entirely Roman. Also Roman are the rites Livy describes: one
of the consuls dedicates a temple and the spoils from the enemies to the victorious
Jupiter, the other carries out the frightening rite of deuotio. He devotes himself and
the enemies to the earth and the Manes. We don’t learn anything, on the other hand,
about possible prayers or ceremonies in the camp of the allies before the beginning
of combat. Is this simply because that does not interest the Romans, only concerned
with their own religion? Perhaps, but Livy describes in detail some chapters further
(10.38) a “sacrifice according to the old religion of Samnites” (sacrum... ex
uetusta Samnitium religione), which takes place two years later, in 293, within the
camp of Aquilonia. A certain interest of an antiquarian or ethnological nature, with
respect to the customs, rites, armaments, etc. of the former enemies of Rome thus
cannot be excluded. This interest is not without distortions: Livy places the cere-
mony in Aquilonia, not in an Italic sanctuary as one might think, but in a camp
planned in the Roman manner (de Cazanove in Ribichini forthcoming). We don’t
have any similar information for Sentinum, but it is rather doubtful that the other
tribes of the Samnites, Gauls, Etruscans, and Umbrians could have conceived rites
to be celebrated together. For this reason, and also in order to preserve a certain
unity of presentation, the pages which follow will be almost exclusively dedicated
not generally to pre-Roman Italy, whose ethnic mixture is too varied to be treated
as a whole, but specifically to the Italic populations, in the precise, dialectal mean-
ing of the term: the peoples who left us the Umbrian, Oscan, and south-Picenian
“Sabellic texts” (Rix 2002).
The battle of Sentinum may be seen as a sign of “the unfinished identity of Italy”
among other such signs, to paraphrase the title of an important study (Giardina 1994).
The author refers to the political identity of Roman Italy, but one can extend the
matter to the religious identity of pre-Roman and Roman Italy. Or rather: one can
speak about Italy as a whole, on the religious level as well as on all others, only in
comparison with Rome; first as a common enemy, then as a power exercising its
hegemony upon all, within the framework of unequal treaties, and finally, starting with
the Social War, as common ciuitasof all the Italians, which involved an in-depth
reshaping of local religious life, as we shall see below.Shared Sanctuaries or Exclusion of the Other?
The absence of a common religious identity does not necessarily imply absence
of contact between ethnic groups in the same sanctuaries. The frequenting by44 Olivier de CazanoveACTC04 25/04/2007 09:26 AM Page 44