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Southern Italy had slowly Hellenized under the influence of Greek poleis along the coast, but the process was uneven and protracted. Tarentum, the largest Greek city in the peninsula, was almost destroyed by Italic Iapyges in the late 5th century BC, a sign of the hostility displayed by the inhabitants of the interior towards the Greek interlopers along the coast.
By the 4th century BC, Italics were more accepting of Hellenization, and some towns claimed Achaean heroes as founders, much as some Romans were anxious to claim Trojan ancestry. Greek traders and their products became prominent, and Apulian potters produced imitations of Greek models. Inscriptions in the local, Indo-European Messapic language are in an alphabet derived – like the Roman – from the Greek, and full of Greek loan words.
In central Italy, Etruscan borrowings were more common than those from the Greeks, especially in Umbria. Samnites, a battle-hardened people who spoke Oscan dialects, were only thinly Hellenized, as they were focused on military matters including the construction of massive fortresses covering entire mountain tops.
Sabellians, which were closely related, were a similar case in that they were closer to the Romans in cultural and political matters than they were to any Greeks: for example, they appointed dictators, like the Latins, at times of emergency.
Into this world, Roman military power came crashing down. In 358 BC, a Roman army under dictator Caius Sulpicius Peticus, including important Latin contingents, defeated a Gaul warband near Praeneste, modern Palestrina, about 40 kilometers east of Rome. This victory appears have served as revenge for the sack of the city in 390 BC, and as evidence for the smaller Latin cities and tribes that three decades of hostility against Rome had only served to weaken them, and new accommodations with the leading power in central Italy were needed.
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