Roman Deportation and Colonisation within Italy

c. 180–41 BCE · Europe & Northern Eurasia

Displacement Territory Seized

Displaced

47,000

Livy gives 40,000 Apuani Ligurians deported from the Apennines to Samnium by the consuls of 180 BCE, with a further 7,000 the following year — the largest deportation of a free population recorded within Italy. Livy was writing about 150 years later from annalistic sources, but the figures are of the administrative kind his sources preserved and are broadly accepted; the deportees' descendants are attested in the second century CE by the alimentary tablet of the Ligures Baebiani, a community in Samnium named for the consul who moved them, which confirms both the transfer and its permanence. The much larger land confiscations of the civil wars, particularly the triumviral proscriptions and settlements of 41 BCE that dispossessed the population of some eighteen Italian towns, are not quantified in the sources.

Share of the population affected

0.94%

of the population of peninsular Italy in the mid-second century BCE, 150 BCE

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What happened

Rome's consolidation of Italy involved both the removal of populations and the implantation of new ones. In 180 BCE the consuls Publius Cornelius Cethegus and Marcus Baebius Tamphilus removed the Apuani Ligurians from their mountain territory and transported some 40,000 of them, with a further 7,000 the next year, to public land in Samnium several hundred kilometres to the south, where they were resettled at state expense — an operation Livy describes in the language of an administrative undertaking and which left a community known for centuries afterwards as the Ligures Baebiani. Confiscation and redistribution of Italian land for citizen colonies and, from Sulla onward, for discharged soldiers, dispossessed many further communities; the triumviral settlements of 41 BCE stripped the territory of around eighteen Italian towns to provide farms for veterans, an episode remembered in the poetry of Virgil and Propertius. The Ligurian figures come from Livy and are corroborated by the later attestation of the resettled community; the civil-war confiscations are described qualitatively rather than counted.

Parties

The Roman Republic uprooted whole peoples within Italy — most notably the Ligurian Apuani in 180 BCE — and repeatedly confiscated the land of Italian communities to settle citizen colonists and discharged soldiers

Disputed

Livy's figure of 40,000 Apuani is a single literary source, though its administrative character and the survival of the Ligures Baebiani community in Samnium support it; the scale of the later civil-war confiscations is not quantified in any source.

The denominator

Italian population figures for the Republic are the subject of the long-running 'low count / high count' dispute. Brunt's low count, built from the census figures of adult male citizens, gives roughly 4-5 million free inhabitants of Italy plus one to two million slaves in the second century BCE; Lo Cascio's high count, reading the census figures differently, implies 12-14 million. The baseline follows the low count, and would be nearly three times larger on the high count.

The affected figure counts documented deportations such as the 47,000 Ligurian Apuani moved to Samnium in 180 BCE, and omits the far larger and unquantified dispossessions of the triumviral land confiscations of 41 BCE.

Where the baseline comes from

Demography of the Roman Empire — Wikipediaopen-edited
Colonia (Roman) — Wikipediaopen-edited

On the death toll

There was no significant death toll attached to the Ligurian deportation itself: Livy describes a state-funded transfer in which the deportees were given land and money at their destination. Deaths in the preceding Ligurian wars and in the civil-war proscriptions belong to those events rather than to the resettlement.

Documented forms of violence

Destruction of Property

Livy records the clearing of Ligurian settlements before the transfer, and the confiscation of Italian civic territory for veteran settlement is described by Appian and reflected in contemporary Latin poetry.

Movements mapped

Apuani Ligurians of the Apennines → Samnium (180–179 BCE)47,000

Countries touched, on present-day borders

Italy

Sources

'180 BCE: Mass Deportation and the Order of Roman Italy', Acta Classica 67 (Newcastle University ePrints)scholarly