Caudini

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The Caudini were a tribe of the Samnites bordering upon Campania. The name is evidently connected with that of the town of Caudium, which must probably have been at one period the capital or chief city of the tribe. But it seems certain that the appellation was not confined to the citizens of Caudium and its immediate territory. Livy speaks in more than one passage of the Caudini as a tribe or people, in the same terms as of the Hirpini ("Marcellus ab Nola crebras excursiones in agrum Hirpinum et Samnites Caudinos fecit", xxiii. 41; "Caudinus Samnis gravius devastatus", Id. xxiv. 20), and Niebuhr supposes them to have been one of the four tribes of which the Samnite confederacy was composed. (Nieb. vol. i. p. 107, vol. ii. p. 85.) It is remarkable that we find no mention of the Caudini as a separate tribe during the wars of the Romans with the Samnites. Perhaps, however, they were included as a matter of course, whenever the Samnites were mentioned, as their country must have been continually the scene of hostilities; and Velleius Paterculus (ii. 1) speaks of the Caudini as the people with whom the treaty was concluded by the Romans after their defeat at the Battle of the Caudine Forks, where Livy uniformly talks of the Samnites. It is impossible to determine with any accuracy the limits of their territory: the great mountain mass of the Taburnus, called by Gratius Faliscus (Cyneget. 509) "Caudinus Taburnus", was in the heart of it; and it is probable that it joined that of the Hirpini on the one side and of the Pentri on the other, while on the west it bordered immediately on Campania. But the name is not recognised by any of the geographers as a general appellation, and appears to have fallen into disuse: the Caudini of Pliny (iii. 11. s. 16) are only the citizens of Caudium.