The Social War (from Latin bellum sociale, "war of the allies"), also known as the Italian War or the Marsic War, was fought between the Roman Republic and several of its autonomous allies (socii), largely from 91 to 88 BC in Italy, with some holdouts persisting until 87 BC.
The war started in late 91 BC with the rebellion of Asculum. Other Italian towns also rebelled and the Roman response was initially confused. By the new year, the Romans had levied armies to oppose the rebels but found initial headway difficult. By the end of the year they were able to cut the Italian rebels into two, isolating them into northern and southern sectors. The Italian rebels attempted to invade Etruria and Umbria at the start of 89 BC but were defeated. In the south, they were defeated by Lucius Cornelius Sulla, who for his victories would win a consulship the next year. The Romans retained the initiative, and by 88 BC the conflict was largely over, and Roman attention had been captured by the ongoing First Mithridatic War. The few Italian rebels on the field by 87 BC eventually reached a negotiated settlement during a short civil war that year. At various stages of the war, Romans brought legislation allowing Italian towns to elect Roman citizenship if they had not revolted or would otherwise put down arms, draining support from the rebels.
Views differ as to the causes of the war, primarily on whether Roman citizenship was already a coveted status and whether the extension of such citizenship was the main goal of the socii. The main ancient source for the period is the relatively late Appian, who wrote in the imperial period during the 2nd century AD, and whose narrative is largely one based on demands of the allies for Roman citizenship. Other historians, most especially Henrik Mouritsen, have focused instead on a perceived alternative tradition, which has the Italian allies rebelling against Roman hegemony and encroachment on allied lands.
The massive expansion of the citizenship that followed the Social War remained a politically-charged topic, especially in terms of how they would be allocated into the tribes that were the traditional units of Roman democratic processes. Disputes over enfranchisement played a role in Sulla's march on Rome in 88 BC to depose the plebeian tribune Publius Sulpicius Rufus. Fears of Sulla rolling back hard-won Italian rights contributed to resistance during Sulla's civil war. The conflict also blurred the distinction between Romans and their enemies; the presence of large armies in Italy during the war also provided opportunities for generals to seize power extralegally. For these reasons and others, some historians believe the conflict played an important role in setting up the collapse of the republic.
Name
The name Social war is an improper English translation of bellum sociale, which means "war of the allies" (from Latin socius, meaning "ally"). Today, the name is used more generally in classics scholarship to refer to any war between allies. The name bellum sociale was first used in the second century AD by the historian Florus, and only became common during the imperial period. The Romans of the time called it the Marsic war named for the Marsi, an Italian tribe located east of Rome who, during the war, killed two Roman consuls, or otherwise called it the Italian war. The focus on the Marsi may also have to do with Quintus Poppaedius Silo, who was one of the Italian leaders.
Usage in the late republican and early imperial period treated the names Marsic and Italian war as largely interchangeable. Cicero's works refer to it as bellum Marsicum or bellum Italicum (though he also uses bella cum sociis); Sallust, according to Aulus Gellius, calls it the Marsic war; Velleius Paterculus, Asconius Pedianus, and Julius Obsequens call it the bellum Italicum. An official senatus consultum dated to 22 May 78 BC calls it bellum Italicum and the Augustan-era fasti consulares call it bellum Marsicum.
Background
Italy in the second century BC
The Italian peninsula during the second century BC was dominated by the Roman Republic, which was allied in a collection of bilateral treaties with the many city-states on the peninsula. In general, those cities received guarantees of territorial integrity and internal self-government in exchange for supporting Rome with men during its many wars. Allied contingents made up an increasing portion of Roman manpower: by 295 BC, the allied contingents of Roman-led armies as a whole outnumbered the Romans on the field and, by 218 BC, there were three allies on the field for every two Romans. This made allied manpower indispensable for Roman military superiority.
Cities cooperated with Rome for various reasons. They received shares of the war spoils and land assignments. Rome also supported allied elites against popular revolts (eg at Arretium, Lucania, and Volsinii in 302, 296, and 264 BC, respectively). While some of the cities defected during the Second Punic War after the Battle of Cannae in 216 BC, the defectors were defeated and harsh terms applied. Over time, the Romans started to interfere in the internal affairs of their allies, though historians differ as to its extent. For example, when the senate acted to suppress the Bacchanalia in 186 BC, historians differ as to whether this applied only to Roman land or was extended extraterritorially to the allies.
By the time of the Social War, the allies were mainly located in the following regions: two northern ones (Etruria and Umbria) and more further south (Lucania, Apulia, and Magna Graecia). As far back as the fifth century, the Oscan and Umbrian-speaking communities in southern Italy had formed a flexible confederal league; the most powerful of these were the Samnites and Lucanians. The Romans had fought with the Samnites in a number of wars during the conquest of Italy; even afterwards, these allies retained their cohesiveness, having defected from Rome as a single bloc during the Second Punic war. Romanisation through to the second century proceeded with considerable heterogeneity: in Apulia and Samnium, Latin influence was largely absent in both the archaeological and literary sources, while in Marsic lands, inscriptions indicate adoption of the Latin alphabet. On the whole, Italian tribes and peoples on the eve of the Social war still held themselves distinct from Rome, just as they had in previous centuries.
Also importantly, before the 1st century AD, it was not possible for a person to hold more than one citizenship. Nor, before the empire, were allied soldiers granted Roman citizenship at the close of their service. For example, Cicero deliberately contrasts Italic single citizenship against Greek multiple citizenship in his speech for Lucius Cornelius Balbus, a provincial who had been granted citizenship by Pompey. Citizenship was linked to territories: a person who received Roman citizenship gave up their local citizenship; losing local citizenship and living outside of Roman territory meant a local reduction in socio-economic status.
Italian demands
The "Italian question" refers to the relationship between Rome and her Italian allies. It is still not entirely clear what the Italian allies were fighting for. There are two threads in the ancient accounts: one depicting the struggle as one for Roman citizenship and another as one against Roman domination.
Edward Bispham, writing in the 2016 Companion to Roman Italy, concludes that "it seems certain that the Social War is best understood as a revolt from Rome" but synthesises the approaches in that the desires for citizenship and independence are themselves expressions of an underlying desire for equality and freedom, inside or outside the Roman political system.
Desire for citizenship
Appian's Civil Wars is the main source for much of this period. It provides three themes for the Italians: support for agrarian reform, votes for land, and demands for political equality. According to Appian, the agrarian reforms of Tiberius Gracchus were meant to support the Italians. However, there is no good evidence to verify this claim and most historians reject it as a political tactic either to distinguish between free and slave or as an anachronism interjected by his brother Gaius to legitimate Gaius' reform agenda some ten years later. Attempts to actually grant citizenship started in 125 BC with a proposal by Marcus Fulvius Flaccus. Gaius Gracchus is said to have brought similar proposals. These attempts were largely brought because Roman tribunes and magistrates believed that granting citizenship could be traded for Italian elites acquiescing over occupied public lands.
Appian similarly frames the war as a reaction to the failed reform proposals of the plebeian tribune of 91 BC, Marcus Livius Drusus. As part of a complex scheme to change criminal court jury composition, Drusus allegedly would have to seduce the people with free land, which required public lands, which required pushing Italians off that land, which required a sweetener of citizenship to quell objections. When the proposals failed, the Italians went to war to secure the citizenship and legal equality denied to them in peace.
The most convincing theme that Appian presents, however, is an Italian desire for political equality: he says the Italians aspired to be "partners in rule rather than subjects". However, it is likely that poor and rich Italians sought different goals: poorer Italians were likely seeking freedom from unfair treatment by Roman magistrates; it would have been their richer compatriots that would benefit from direct access to Roman politics.
More modern versions of the citizenship thesis have been advanced by Emilio Gabba, arguing that Italian commercial classes (the publicani) drove romanisation in an attempt to share in the rewards of empire. The exalted position of Italian businessmen in the provinces may have absolved their status inferiority at home; combined with a desire to influence Roman provincial policy, they may have sought to secure their business rights by becoming Roman citizens. This thesis, however, is not widely accepted since the Italians who were most exposed to the Greek East were not those who led the revolt and had to be coerced into joining it. Similarly, A N Sherwin-White believed that the Italians wanted Roman citizenship to secure legal equality. Less convincingly, D B Nagle argued that economic factors could explain the start of the war.
Rebellion
Henrik Mouritsen, in the influential 1998 book Italian Unification, argues that Appian's citizenship narrative is highly anachronistic. For writers in the imperial period, Roman citizenship was highly desirable. Those writers then retrojected that desirability onto the Italians who lived centuries before their time. His analysis of the evidence also concludes that before the Social War, there was little agitation for citizenship, multiple citizenships still being invalid, which would have been incompatible with local autonomy. As to the possibility of votes for land, he writes "Flaccus' citizenship bill [and bills similar to it] would have been infinitely more far-reaching in its implications than the reform promoted... it would lead to a total upheaval of the traditional alliance system on which Roman domination in Italy had been based for centuries... as an attempt to restart the land distribution process the bill would probably have been of scant value". The extent of the upheaval of the alliance system similarly leads Mouritsen to reject granting citizenship as part of Drusus' attempt to change jury composition as means far in excess of the ends sought.
Instead, Mouritsen focuses on Italian discontent with Roman public land reform. Rome's public lands had been won centuries prior to the 90s BC when the republic had subjugated the Italian peninsula. Newer lands had also been forcibly taken from southern Italian cities that had sided with Hannibal during the Second Punic War. With each victory, the Romans demanded and received from the Italians a latent title to lands the Italians still occupied. For centuries, Roman claims on those lands were unenforced. After the start of the land reform process in 133 BC with Tiberius Gracchus's lex Sempronia, Italians started to complain about Roman magistrates illegally encroaching on their land holdings; in 129 BC, the senate acted and deprived the land redistribution commission of its survey jurisdiction, putting a pause on land distributions. The commission, before the pause in 129 BC, likely quickly surveyed and parceled out the unoccupied and recently surveyed Hannibalic war-era lands. The older holdings elsewhere, however, were impossible to disentangle from private lands. Never surveyed and with unclear borders, Italians objected to the land commission's infringements on their property, which was guaranteed by treaty. The objections brought the redistributive process quickly to a halt.
Mouritsen proposed instead the following reconstruction for the start of the war in the late 90s BC. Drusus, seeking to placate the plebs in exchange for a change in the jury courts, proposed a law to do more widespread land distributions against the allies' protests. Their anger increased when the law passed over their objections and Rome started seizing allied lands; the allies therefore started preparations for an insurrection by late summer 91 BC. Amid this distrust, Drusus was blamed for breaking down relations with the allies, which led to a confrontation between Drusus and the consul, Lucius Marcius Philippus, in the senate some time in September. Rome responded to these rumours of Italian unrest by sending garrison forces into Italy, which explains their capture at the start of the war. Drusus may have then attempted to rescue his standing and placate the allies by trying to pass a law to give the allies citizenship. After this attempt failed amid Drusus' declining popularity, the attempts of the Latins – who actually were agitating for citizenship – to assassinate the consuls, who opposed Latin citizenship, at the Latin Festival became known. With the prospect of the Latins deserting Rome, the balance of military power would shift into the Italians' favour. After secret negotiations, the Italians then launched their bid to throw off Roman hegemony.
Outbreak
Preparations
As evidenced by the destruction of Fregellae after an attempted revolt in 125 BC, it was an enormous risk to rebel against Rome. The Italians, in planning their war, would have to form reliable alliances secured with hostages. Appian describes a long series of secret negotiations between the Italian states, of which Rome was ignorant.