After Cannae, Hannibal needed a maritime base to allow reinforcements and supplies to reach him. But he failed to win over or capture Naples, an old Roman naval ally, and had mixed results elsewhere in Campania: he was successful at proud Capua. He was under-supported from Carthage for all his time in Italy, whether because they could not or would not help him. In 215, he signed a treaty of alliance with Philip V of Macedon. This brought few benefits to either party and would long be remembered by the Romans. Syracuse in Sicily went over to Hannibal in 214 but was recaptured by Claudius Marcellus (late 212). Similarly most of coastal Tarentum in south Italy was in his hands, but only between 212 and 209. In 211, when Capua was under Roman pressure, Hannibal marched on Rome as a diversionary tactic but soon withdrew. Capua fell and was harshly treated.

This chapter treats the use of history in Oscan Campania in the Middle Republican period. While we have no written histories from the region at this time, by taking a broader understanding of “historical culture” I argue that we may still recognize complex and developing interests in recording and using the past on the part of Campanian elites. In particular, tomb paintings of the fourth and third centuries BCE show a radically new iconography that seems intended to convey real events. The pattern of cultural development in the region compares well with coeval trends at Rome. These affinities confirm that Rome’s own development toward written history by the Second Punic War should not be understood as uniquely Roman but as having formed a local expression of wider Italian cultural trends.

In this chapter, the literary, documentary, and archaeological evidence pertaining to horticulture and arboriculture in eastern Gallia Cisalpina and in Campania is investigated. The chapter argues that these two regions of Roman Italy played an important role for horticultural developments in the late Republic and early imperial era, both as producers of fruit and vegetables and possibly also as developers of new cultivars. The archaeobotanical record of Gallia Cisalpina also clearly shows that, from the Augustan era throughout the whole of the first century AD, the frequency and diversity of recovered remains of fruit greatly increased. These two regions had very important ports, Puteoli and Aquileia, which handled a large amount of trade coming from the rest of the Mediterranean and it is possible that these ports were entry routes into the wider region first, and the rest of Italy later, for new fruit trees coming from the eastern Mediterranean regions such as the peach, the apricot, and the citron/lemon.