Sulla it was entirely destroyed; and he sent a military colony into the place, because he wanted to punish it, but did not rebuild it on its ancient site; the new town he founded in the neighbourhood of the old one was called _Bovianum Undecumanorum_. In like manner, he did not restore Faesulae, but founded Florentia, at some distance on the river Arnus. At Arretium he followed the same system. At present, Bovianum is quite an insignificant place; it occupies the site of the Roman and not of the Samnite town. From this one example, you may infer the fate of all the Samnite towns: many of them, the conquest of which is mentioned by Livy in his ninth and tenth books, entirely disappear from the earth, so that they are not mentioned either by Pliny or by Ptolemy. The country is at present full of towns and villages, but very few of their names are indicative of their ancient origin. In all Samnium there is not a single ruin belonging to the period preceding the Roman dominion. I have not been there, but Count Zurlo, a Samnite by birth, who has examined his own country very carefully, has assured me that, with the exception of the few Samnite denarii and some copper coins, no antiquities older than the Roman dominion are found in all Samnium, from the extreme frontier of the Pentrians to that of the Hirpinians; nor are there any tombs which are of such frequent occurrence in Campania. But it could not have been otherwise, for the Romans systematically destroyed everything in that country; otherwise such an utter disappearance of everything would be unaccountable: both during the third Samnite war and in that of Sulla, the Romans attempted to extirpate the whole nation. Strabo says that only ἴχνη πόλεων ἀμαυρὰ were left; and as the nation so also its language disappeared. Such was the revenge Sulla took for the battle at the Colline gate! He not only butchered the prisoners of war, but after having become master of Italy, he rooted out the whole population. In the country of the Pentrians, there are a few places, especially on the west of the Vulturnus, concerning which it is doubtful whether they were properly Samnite, that is, belonging to the Pentrians, or whether they were Oscan towns conquered by the Samnites. Places of this kind are ALLIFAE and AQUINUM[53], a large town on the Via Latina and a praefectura Romana, that is, it had the Roman franchise before its being conferred upon all the Italians, but the administration was in the hands of a Roman praefectus. Aquinum was the birth-place of the great poet Juvenal. A third town was AESERNIA, which, after the third Samnite war, became a Roman colony.