We must conceive each Samnite tribe to have had its own senate, from which deputies were elected to deliberate on common affairs, as the Romans and Latins did at the Feriae Latinae. In this manner the Samnite praetors and imperators met, perhaps with deputies and the heads of the senate (_decem primi_). Samnium, in this extended sense, is a country presenting very different aspects. The part extending on the coast from Herculaneum as far as the Silarus, belongs, according to its physical features, most decidedly to southern Italy; I will not say that it is essentially a Hellenic country, but it is like a Hellenic, it is a Tyrrhenian country. It had originally a Tyrrhenian population, though it was governed by Samnites, and at an earlier period probably by Oscans. In the interior, we have the Apennines, a very beautiful mountain country with some very fertile valleys, and on the whole such as we generally understand by a mountainous region. The hills nowhere rise to the height of the Abruzzi, and nowhere beyond the limits of vegetation; they are woody mountains, and the forests are for the most part still preserved. The country of the Frentanians is hilly, and in no way remarkable. The Samnite tribes were distributed in the following manner:—The FRENTANIANS dwelt on the other side of the Apennines as far as the Adriatic. The PENTRIANS were the northernmost tribe in the interior, between the country of the Pelignians and the neighbourhood of Beneventum; their capital was Bovianum. In the south of them we have the CAUDINES, who unquestionably possessed the whole district about the river Calor, a tributary of the Vulturnus, and Beneventum. The HIRPINIANS dwelt still farther south, between the Caudines, Lucanians, and Apulians. On the south-west of the Hirpinians the coast district extended from mount Vesuvius to the river Silarus; the Samnites of this last district, as I have already observed, are not known to us under any certain ethnic name, though it is probable that they may have been called _Alfaterni_ or _Alfaterini_.