Roman historiography found one of its favorite topics in the description of victorious campaigns. The ancient authors often recounted the glorious conquests of glorious generals in great detail, which means that a comparatively much is known about Roman warfare today. The most prominent example: Gaius Julius Caesar’s sprawling, propagandistic description of his military conquests in Gaul, today the horror of many Latin students and the delight of every historian.
The situation is different with campaigns that were not carried out at the external borders, but on the Italian peninsula itself. Here the ancient authors skimp on details when it comes to the fate of the country and its population. These areas were rich, densely populated and important cultural landscapes. “Interestingly, the written sources about it are very silent,” says Dominik Maschek, professor of Roman archeology at the University of Trier. There is an astonishing gap in research here. But apparently the authors once held back for good reasons. As an excavation project led by Maschek now shows, the Romans were apparently anything but squeamish when it came to campaigns against their immediate neighbors.
A research team from the Mainz Leibniz Center for Archeology (LEIZA) is excavating in the immediate vicinity of the ancient city of Fregellae, located around 100 kilometers southeast of Rome. Fregellae was once a wealthy city, located at a strategically important checkpoint in a river valley and allied with Rome for many years, also due to family connections. At the end of the second century BC, the Fregellans demanded Roman citizenship, the prerequisite for political participation. But the Romans denied their allies this right. The Fregellans then rebelled against the Republic, a fatal decision. In 125 BC, a Roman army besieged Fregellae and razed the city to the ground.
“This devastation must have been incredibly traumatic”
The written sources for this episode are also extremely thin. However, archaeological excavations in the city area documented Fregellae’s fate as early as the 1980s. The LEIZA excavation team is now continuing this work. The researchers are concentrating on a farm in the immediate vicinity of the former city in order to find out how much the rich cultural landscape around the wealthy Fregellae was devastated at the time. The archaeologists hope that this will provide insights into Roman warfare in intra-Italian conflicts, primarily during sieges. “We are actually the first people who have ever looked into this,” says Maschek.
The preliminary conclusion after the first summer excavation campaign: Both the city and the surrounding area were massively and fundamentally destroyed. The archaeologist says that no one would have settled in Fregellae itself or in the northern surroundings of the city for a period of around 600 years. It is therefore hardly surprising that the Roman authors elegantly avoided the fate of rural areas. “This devastation must have been incredibly traumatic,” says Maschek. Such violence might have been morally justifiable for contemporaries against so-called barbarians, but against the Italian brothers and sisters? Hardly likely.
At the same time, the researchers are interested in the previously unknown perspective of the Fregellans themselves. A revolt against Rome was extremely risky; it must have been discussed extensively in the city. Was it a spontaneous popular uprising or a planned rebellion? As long-time allies, the Fregellans were well-versed in Roman warfare; Did you want to use this knowledge for yourself?
Did the Fregellans themselves devastate their surrounding area?
Finds in the homestead even point to another possibility: Did the Fregellans possibly destroy their surrounding area themselves? The archaeologists found organic residues of ancient grain in and around a destroyed storage vessel. Archaeobotanical studies are now intended to determine grain type and degree of ripeness. This allows the time of destruction to be narrowed down to the time of year – and thus also the beginning of the siege by Rome. At first glance, the grain does not appear to have been threshed yet. The farm would therefore have to have been destroyed shortly after the harvest. This would fit the picture if the uprising had been planned for a long time, explains Dominik Maschek: “The Fregellans would not have rebelled in this case if the Romans had had the best conditions for a military campaign. Instead, they would have confronted them with a harvested landscape.” And maybe with more?
It is conceivable that before the uprising, the Fregellans not only brought in their entire harvest and brought it to the city, but also ultimately destroyed the surrounding area themselves in order to prepare for a long siege and make things as difficult as possible for the besiegers. However, it apparently didn’t help. The Romans surrounded the city and quickly conquered it. Fregellae was destroyed and probably looted. The researchers want to continue digging in the summer of 2024.