Submitted for award of PhD September 2006. - King's College London

2.5. Social elite and Samnite leaders
The importance of kinship and genres in southern Italy in antiquity has long been
recognised. 279 The leading genres were prime movers of changes of different types:
their need for land led to the conflicts with Rome, which culminated in the Samnite
Wars, and their desire for the recognition of their rights or the Roman citizenship was
one main motive for the Social War. Several genres appear again and again in
inscriptions and written accounts of Samnium. The questions of how family groups
were defined and how some achieved a leading role cannot be studied due to the lack
of evidence. Few scholars go beyond describing the Samnites broadly as a society of
peasants and herdsmen, who `lived a life of toil and hardship'. Large landed estates,
Salmon continued, `were owned by a handful of families who enjoyed wealth,
power, and authority, and for centuries were the leaders of the nation and makers of
its policy'. 280 Dench has drawn a more nuanced picture of the social structure of the
Samnite `mountain' society? g' It is not my aim here to provide a general study of
Samnite society. However, prosopographic evidence from inscriptions, coins and
literary sources, can be used to study the breadth or narrowness of the elite in
Samnium, and the issue of elite mobility.
The safest approach is to study two elite groups that can be identified with
certainty: first the political elite, who appear as meddices tutici in inscribed
dedications and tile stamps; second, the military leaders of the Social War attested on
coins and in the literary evidence. A third group of the recorded military leaders of
278 Lintott (1999) 115-20.
279
e. g. Lomas (2000) 84 on Apulia.
280 Salmon (1967) 52-3.
281 Dench (1995) 140-53.
84