Italic Mercenaries in the Pre-Roman Period

Abstract The widespread practice of mercenary military service must have contributed to the ancient perception of the pre-Roman Italic peoples as bellicose. For the Campani, the practice represented, at least in part, a relevant economic activity of a dominant class (equites Campani) or even of the male representatives of the minores gentes. For the Samnites, Lucani, and Bruttii, however, it continued to fulfill a fundamental demographic and economic function, along with other forms of mobility or the violent appropriation of goods (war, banditry). For these populations, mercenary practices were a long-standing historical phenomenon, which this chapter reconstructs in broad strokes between the sixth and third centuries BCE.