SAMNITES, the name given by the Romans to the warlike tribes inhabiting the mountainous centre of the southern half of Italy. The word Samnites was not the name, so far as we know, used by the Samnites themselves, which would seem rather to have been (the Oscan form of) the word which in Latin appears as Sabini (see below). The ending of Samnites seems to be con nected with the name by which they were known to the Greeks of the Campanian coast. Both from tradition and from surviving inscriptions (see OSCAN and R. S. Conway, Italic Dialects, pp. 169-206) it is clear that they spoke Oscan; and tradition records that the Samnites were an offshoot of the Sabines (see e.g., Festus, p. 326 Muller). On two inscriptions, of which one is unfortunately incomplete, and the other is the legend on a coin of the Social War, we have the form Safinim, which would be in Latin Sabinium, and is best regarded as the nominative or accusa tive singular, neuter or masculine, agreeing with some substantive understood, such as nummum (see Conway, ibid., pp. 188, 216). The abundance of the group names ending in the suffix -no in all the Samnite districts classes them unmistakably with the great Safine stock (see SABINI). The Samnites are thus intimately
related to the patrician class at Rome (see ROME: History).
The longest and most important monument of the Oscan lan guage, as it was spoken by the Samnites (in, probably, the 3rd century B.c.) is the small bronze tablet, engraved on both sides, known as the Tabula Agnonensis, found in 1848 at the modern village Agnone, not very far from the site of Bovianum, which was the centre of the northern group of Samnites called Pentri. This inscription, now preserved in the British Museum, is care fully engraved in full Oscan alphabet.
The text and commentary will be found in Conway, op. cit., p. 191 : it contains a list of deities to whom statues were erected in the precinct sacred to Ceres, or some allied divinity, and on the back a list of deities to whom altars were erected.
See R. S. Conway, Dialectorum Italicarum exempla selecta, and C. D. Buck, Oscan and Umbrian Grammar.