PICENES. The Picenes do not figure at all prominently in the writings of ancient historians. They played a considerable role, however, in the confederacy of Italian states which chal lenged the hegemony of the growing Roman republic, and were punished at the end of the Social War by the complete suppression of their independence. The Picene capital was Ascoli, a little south of Ancona, on the eastern foothills of the Abruzzi.
The territory of the Picenes extended, to judge from the uni form character of the archaeological remains, all along the Adriatic coast from Rimini to the river Sangro ; south of which again the Samnite mountaineers of Aufidena exhibited a civilization of identical character, though far less opulent. Inland, the Picene influence, and very probably the same population, extended as far as the midrib of the Apennines. A very ancient settlement at Terni, made long before moo B.c., may plausibly be attributed to them, and some writers think that they had a certain number of stations even in Latium. This would be perfectly natural if the Picenes were the principal survivors of a fairly homogeneous Neolithic population which once extended over the whole north and centre of Italy. According to this theory the Neolithic people were conquered and overwhelmed first by the invaders of the Bronze Age and then by the Villanovans (see VILLANOVANS). Neither of these incursions, however, penetrated further down the east coast than Rimini, at which point they were checked and diverted by the fighting forces of the Picenes.
This people retained its independence down to the third century B.C. when it finally succumbed to the Romans. It represents a phase of culture in the Early Iron Age diametrically opposed to that of the Villanovans, derived from a different source and de veloped under different inspiration. The first contrast between Villanovans and Picenes is in respect of their burial customs. The Villanovans cremated their dead, and the small percentage of inhumations occurring here and there within their territory may be ascribed to the survival of some few of the original Neolithic inhabitants. The Picenes on the other hand used no rite except
inhumation ; they buried their dead in the earth, generally in the contracted position customary among the aborigines, and cremation was entirely unknown in their part of the country.
The beginning of archaeological research in Picenum dates from the discovery by E. Brizio, in 1892, of two large and important cemeteries at Novilara, near Pesaro. Two remarkable stelae had been found in this neighbourhood 3o years earlier, with lines written in a script resembling the Etruscan in its general character, but expressing a wholly different language which is inferred to be Sabellic (q.v.). Several more of these stelae were found at Novilara itself, and at neighbouring places including Fano, but they still await translation. Two of them are engraved with rude but very interesting pictures of native life, representing naval battles and scenes of hunting and fighting. They are further ornamented with spiral designs, which misled earlier investigators, who saw only their superficial resemblance to sub-Mycenaean patterns It is now established that the stelae are at any rate not older than loo B.C.
In the Novilara cemeteries were found, besides stelae, numerous other objects and ornaments which make it possible to recon struct some outlines of the economic history of the Adriatic coast. About a dozen tombs at Novilara are as early as the loth and gth centuries B.C., while a few sporadic finds at Ancona and neighbouring points are no less ancient. From the contents of these it can be seen that the east coast of Italy was participating as early as the loth century in the important trade in Baltic amber, which came down a main trunk route to the head of the Gulf of Venice. It can be seen also that Pesaro and Ancona were in no way dependent upon Bologna, inasmuch as many of the fibulae are of types quite unknown to the Villanovans though perfectly familiar in Greece and Sicily.