Episode 11. The Samnite Wars, Part One: The Road to the Caudine Forks

Works Cited Primary Sources Appian. Samnite Wars. A fragmentary account that preserves some details not in Livy.Cicero. De Re Publica; De Officiis. Several passages discuss the devotio, Manlius Torquatus, and the moral significance of the Latin War settlement.Diodorus Siculus. Library of History. Books 16–19. A parallel Greek account; his silence on the First Samnite War is one of the principal reasons scholars question Livy’s account of that conflict.Livy. Ab Urbe Condita. Books 7–9. The principal narrative for the First and Second Samnite Wars, the Latin War, and the Caudine Forks. Books 7–8 cover the First Samnite War and the Latin War; Book 9 opens with the Caudine disaster and covers the recovery.Secondary Sources Cornell, T. J. The Beginnings of Rome. Routledge, 1995. Essential on the Samnite Wars, the Latin War, and the settlement of 338 BCE. Cornell’s analysis of the citizenship spectrum remains the standard treatment.Forsythe, Gary. A Critical History of Early Rome. University of California Press, 2005. Particularly useful on the historiographical problems of the First Samnite War and the reliability of Livy’s sources.Goldsworthy, Adrian. The Fall of the West (2009) and Roman Warfare (2000). Good on the manipular army’s development and the military context of the Samnite Wars.Rosenstein, Nathan. Rome at War. University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Essential on manpower, the economics of Roman military expansion, and what sustained warfare meant for the Roman peasant farmer.Salmon, Edward Togo. Samnium and the Samnites. Cambridge University Press, 1967. The fundamental study of Samnite history, society, and culture; the most thorough treatment of the Samnites as a people rather than simply as Rome’s adversary.