Latium Adjectum or Adiectum (Latin for "Attached" or "Extended Latium") or Latium Novum ("New Latium") was a region of Roman Italy between Monte Circeo and the river Garigliano, south of and immediately adjacent to Old Latium and included with it under the Roman Empire.
As a geographical term, it was used at least as early as the 1st century AD, when mention of it occurs in Pliny in conjunction with Latium Antiquum, the original territory of the Latin tribe. Says Pliny of the latter: [1]
Its inhabitants have often changed: at various times it has been occupied by various peoples — the Aborigines, the Pelasgi, the Arcades, the Siculi, the Aurunci, the Rutuli ...
Then he speaks of a later extension to the river Garigliano, to include the Volsci, Osci and Ausones. The "last town" in Latium Adjectum was Sinuessa. [2]
Pliny's remarks concerning Latium are part of his description of Italy: [3]
...a land which is at once the nurseling and the mother of all other lands, chosen by providence of the gods to make heaven itself more glorious, to unite scattered empires, to make manners gentle, to draw together in converse by community of language the jarring and uncouth tongues of so many nations, to give mankind civilization, and in a word to become throughout the world the single fatherland of all the races.
After waxing yet more eloquent concerning Italy — he was in fact north Italian himself, rather than Roman — he then gives: [4]
an account of a circuit of Italy, and of its cities. Herein it is necessary to premise that we intend to follow the authority of his late Majesty Augustus, and to adopt the division that he made of the whole of Italy into eleven regions ...
Latium and Campania together comprise Region I, of which Latium is divided into Latium Vetus/Antiquus and Latium Adjectum/Novum.
It included the Hernican cities of Anagnia (their capital [5] ), Ferentinum, Aletrium, and Verulae, a group of mountain strongholds on the north side of the valley of the Trerus (the River Sacco); together with the Volscian cities on the south of the same valley, and in that of the Liris, the whole of which, with the exception of its extreme upper end, was included in the Volscian territory. Here were situated Signia, Frusino, Fabrateria, Fregellae, Sora, Arpinum, Atina, Aquinum, Casinum, [6] and Interamna; Anxur (Terracina) was the only seaport that properly belonged to the Volscians, the coast from there to the mouth of the Liris being included in the territory of the Aurunci, or Ausones as they were termed by Greek writers, who possessed the maritime towns of Fundi, Formiae, Caieta, and Minturnae, together with Suessa in the interior, which had replaced their more ancient capital of Aurunca. Sinuessa, on the seacoast between the Liris (Garigliano) and the Vulturnus, at the foot of the Mons Massicus, was the last town in Latium according to the official use of the term and was sometimes assigned to Campania, while Suessa was more assigned to Latium. On the other hand, as Nissen points out (Italische Landeskunde, ii. 554), the Pons Campanus, by which the Via Appia crossed the Savo some 9 m. SE of Sinuessa, indicates by its name the position of the old Campanian frontier. In the interior the boundary fell between Casinum and Teanum Sidicinum, at about the 100th milestone of the Via Latina, a fact which led later to the jurisdiction of the Roman courts being extended on every side to the 100th mile from the city, and to this being the limit beyond which banishment from Rome was considered to begin.
Though the Apennines comprised within the boundaries of Latium do not rise to a height approaching that of the loftiest summits of the central range, they attain to a considerable altitude, and form steep and rugged mountain masses from 4,000 to 5,000 ft. high. They are traversed by three principal valleys: (1) that of the Anio, now called Aniene (and formerly Teverone), which descends from above Subiaco to Tivoli, where it enters the plain of the Campagna; (2) that of the Trerus (River Sacco), which has its source below Palestrina (Praeneste), and flows through a comparatively broad valley that separates the main mass of the Apennines from the Volscian mountains or Monti Lepini, until it joins the Liris below Ceprano; (3) that of the Liris (Garigliano), which enters the confines of New Latium about 20 m. from its source, flows past the town of Sora, and has a very tortuous course from there to the sea at Minturnae; its lower valley is for the most part of considerable width, and forms a fertile tract of considerable extent, bordered on both sides by hills covered with vines, olives and fruit trees, and thickly studded with towns and villages.
Following the Roman conquests, several Roman and Latin colonies were established in the territory. Roman colonies were smaller colonies inhabited by Roman citizens and normally set up along the coast. The internal area of Latium Adjectum (today known as Latin Valley), crossed by the Via Latina, was instead colonized through the establishment of Latin colonies, inhabited by Latins and Romans who lost their citizenship.
Lazio or Latium is one of the 20 administrative regions of Italy. Situated in the central peninsular section of the country, it has 5,714,882 inhabitants and a GDP of more than €212 billion per year, making it the country's second most populated region and second largest regional economy after Lombardy. The capital of Lazio is Rome, which is also the capital and largest city of Italy, and completely encircles Vatican City.
The Osci were an Italic people of Campania and Latium adiectum before and during Roman times. They spoke the Oscan language, also spoken by the Samnites of Southern Italy. Although the language of the Samnites was called Oscan, the Samnites were never referred to as Osci, nor were the Osci called Samnites.
The Volsci were an Italic tribe, well known in the history of the first century of the Roman Republic. At the time they 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. Rivals of Rome for several hundred years, their territories were taken over by and assimilated into the growing republic by 304 BC. Rome's first emperor Augustus was of Volscian descent.
Sora is a town and comune of Lazio, Italy, in the province of Frosinone. It is built in a plain on the banks of the Liri. This part of the valley is the seat of some important manufacturing, especially of paper mills. The area around Sora is famous for the costumes of its peasants.
The Liri is one of the principal rivers of central Italy, flowing into the Tyrrhenian Sea a little below Minturno under the name Garigliano.
Monte Massico is a mountain situated in the Italian Province of Caserta (Campania) between the rivers Volturno and Garigliano.
The province of Frosinone is a province in the Lazio region of Italy. Its capital is the city of Frosinone. It has an area of 3,247 square kilometres (1,254 sq mi) and a total population of 493,605 (2016). The province contains 91 comuni, listed in the comuni of the province of Frosinone.
The Aurunci were an Italic tribe that lived in southern Italy from around the 1st millennium BC. They were eventually defeated by Rome and subsumed into the Roman Republic during the second half of the 4th century BC.
Satricum, an ancient town of Latium vetus, lay on the right bank of the Astura river some 60 kilometres (37 mi) SE of Rome in a low-lying region south of the Alban Hills, at the NW border of the Pontine Marshes. It was directly accessible from Rome via a road running roughly parallel to the Via Appia.
"Ausones", the original name and the extant Greek form for the Latin "Aurunci", was a name applied by Greek writers to describe various Italic peoples inhabiting the southern and central regions of Italy. The term was used, specifically, to denote the particular tribe which Livy termed the Aurunci, but later it was applied to all Italians, and Ausonia became a poetic term, in Greek and Latin, for Italy itself.
Cori is a city and comune in the province of Latina, in the Lazio region of central Italy.
The Monti Aurunci is a mountain range of southern Lazio, in central Italy. It is part of the Antiappennini, a group running from the Apennines chain to the Tyrrhenian Sea, where it forms the promontory of Gaeta. It is bounded to the north-west by the Ausoni Mountains, to the north by the Liri river, to the east by the Ausente, to the south-east by the Garigliano and to the south by the Tyrrhenian sea. The line between the Aurunci and the Ausoni has not been clearly established but the Aurunci are considered by convention to be east of a line through Fondi, Lenola, Pico, S. Giovanni and Incarico. Altitudes vary from hills to the 1,533 m of Monte Petrella. Main peaks include the Redentore (1,252 m) and Monte Sant'Angelo (1,402 m). They include a regional park, the Parco Naturale dei Monti Aurunci, created in 1997.
The military campaigns of the Samnite Wars were an important stage in Roman expansion in the Italian Peninsula.
The Sacco is a river of central Italy, a right tributary of the Liri. It flows between the Metropolitan City of Rome Capital and the province of Frosinone in Lazio.
Valle Latina is an Italian geographical and historical region that extends from the south of Rome to Cassino, corresponding to the eastern area of ancient Roman Latium.
Sinuessa was a city of Latium, in the more extended sense of the name, situated on the Tyrrhenian Sea, about 10 km north of the mouth of the Volturno River. It was on the line of the Via Appia, and was the last place where that great highroad touched on the sea-coast. The ruins of the city are located in the modern-day comune of Sessa Aurunca. The city ruins are located, as the crow flies, 12.24 km SSW from the modern city of Sessa Aurunca and 41.43 km from the Province of Caserta. It is 26.71 km from the regional capital (Naples/Napoli) Campania, Italy.
Suessa Pometia was an ancient city of Latium, which had ceased to exist in historical times. Although the modern city of Pomezia is named after it, the exact location of the ancient city is unknown.
The Campanians were an ancient Italic tribe, part of the Osci nation, speaking an Oscan language.
The Roman–Volscian wars were a series of wars fought between the Roman Republic and the Volsci, an ancient Italic people. Volscian migration into southern Latium led to conflict with that region's old inhabitants, the Latins under leadership of Rome, the region's dominant city-state. By the late 5th century BC, the Volsci were increasingly on the defensive and by the end of the Samnite Wars had been incorporated into the Roman Republic. The ancient historians devoted considerable space to Volscian wars in their accounts of the early Roman Republic, but the historical accuracy of much of this material has been questioned by modern historians.
The Valle del Liri is a valley and a geographical region of southern Lazio and part of the larger Latin Valley, located in the province of Frosinone, crossed by the Liri river. The main urban center of the area is Sora.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain : Ashby, Thomas (1911). "Latium". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica . Vol. 16 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 268–273.
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