The Volsci were an ancient Italic people, well known in the history of the first century of the Roman Republic. They then inhabited the partly hilly, partly marshy district of the south of Latium, bounded by the Aurunci and Samnites on the south, the Hernici on the east, and stretching roughly from Norba and Cora in the north to Antium in the south.
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Strabo says that the Volsci formed a sovereign state near the site of Rome.[1] It was placed in the Pomentine plain, between the Latins and the Pontine marshes, which took their name from the plain.
The Volsci spoke Volscian, a Sabellic Italic language, which was closely related to Oscan and Umbrian, but also to Latin, more distantly.
In the Volscian territory lay the little town of Velitrae (modern Velletri), the home town of the ancestors of Caesar Augustus. From this town comes an inscription dating probably from early in the 3rd century BC; it is cut upon a small bronze plate (now in the Naples Museum), which must have once been fixed to some votive object, dedicated to the god Declunus (or the goddess Decluna).
They were among the most dangerous enemies of ancient Rome, and frequently allied with the Aequi, whereas their neighbours the Hernici from 486 BC onwards were the allies of Rome.
According to Rome's early semi-legendary history, Rome's seventh and last king Lucius Tarquinius Superbus was the first to go to war against the Volsci, commencing two centuries of a relationship of conflict between the two states. Tarquinius took the wealthy town of Suessa Pometia, the spoils of which he used to construct the great Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. [2] He celebrated a triumph for his victory.[3]
Also, the legendary Roman warrior Gaius Marcius Coriolanus earned his cognomen after taking the Volscian town of Corioli in 493 BC. The supposed rise and fall of this hero is chronicled in Shakespeare's Coriolanus.
However, if Livy's account of the war between Rome and Clusium is accurate, it can be seen that the relationship between Rome and the Volsci was not always hostile. Livy writes that, at the approach of the Clusian army in 508 BC, with the prospect of a siege, the Roman senate arranged for the purchase of grain from the Volsci to feed the lower classes of Rome.[4]
A number of well-known Roman nobles of the late Republican period originated in former Volscian territory. Gaius Marius, seven times Roman consul and military reformer, and the Roman orator and writer Cicero were natives of Arpinum, deep in Volscian territory. Caesar Augustus spent his early life in Velitrae, where he may have been born.
The warrior maiden Camilla, a character in Virgil's Aeneid, is a Volscian.