Roman War with Veii, Second

The destruction of Athens' fleet at Aegospotami effectively ends the Peloponnesian War, and Athens surrenders in the following year.

Sparta has resoundingly failed to destroy the Athenian empire, and in this sense Athens, whatever its financial and human losses, has won the Peloponnesian War.

Thucydides observes that contemporary Greeks were shocked not that Athens eventually fell after the defeat in Sicily, but rather that it fought on for as long as it did, so devastating were the losses suffered.

The Corinthian War, pitting Sparta against a coalition of four allied states, Thebes, Athens, Corinth, and Argos, which are initially backed by Persia, lasts from 395 BCE until 387 BCE.

The immediate cause of the war was a local conflict in northwest Greece in which both Thebes and Sparta intervened.

The results are inconclusive: under the Peace of Antalcidas, dictated by Persia, Ionia is ceded to Persia and the Boeotian league is dissolved, as is the union of Argos and Corinth.

Himilco, the new Carthaginian commander in Sicily, sacks Camarina and repeatedly defeats the army of Dionysius I, the new tyrant of Syracuse.

The plague strikes the Carthaginian army again, and Himilco agrees to a peace treaty that leaves the Carthaginians in control of all the recent conquests, with Selinus, Thermae, Akragas, Gela and Camarina as tributary vassals.

Carthaginian power is at its peak in Sicily.

Dionysius fights a war with Carthage from 397 BCE; he also carries on an expedition against Rhegium, capturing it and attacking its allied cities in Magna Graecia.

In one campaign, in which he is joined by the Lucanians, he devastates the territories of Thurii and Croton in an attempt to defend Locri.

Veii, the richest city of the Etruscan League, located on the southern border of Etruria, has been alternately at war and in alliance with Rome for over three hundred years.

It eventually falls in 396 BCE to army of the Roman general Camillus.

Veii continues to be occupied after its capture by the Romans.

The besieged Veiians have received help from only three Etruscan city states for nine years, after which the Roman forces under Camillus (supposedly dictator five times) gain control of the flat land to the north of Veii and reputedly crawl through drainage tunnels into the city’s center to capture, sack, and utterly destroy it in about 396 BCE.

After selling its citizens into slavery, Camillus undertakes an evocatio (transfer) of the statue and cult of Veii’s patron goddess, Juno Regina, to Rome.

Etruscan Volsinii (Velzna or Velusna; or sometimes in Latin Volsinii Veteres—Old Volsinii) appears to have been one of the most powerful cities of Etruria, the cult center of the god Voltumna, and is doubtless one of the twelve that formed the Etruscan confederation, as Volsinii is designated by Livy and Valerius Maximus as one of the capita Etruriae ("heads of Etruria").

It is described by Juvenal as seated among well-wooded hills.

Volsinii first appears in history after the fall of Veii (396 BCE).

The Volsinienses, in conjunction with the Salpinates, taking advantage of a famine and pestilence that has desolated Rome, make incursions into the Roman territory in 391 BCE.

They are defeated: eight thousand are made prisoners; but they purchase a twenty years' truce on condition of restoring the booty they had taken, and furnishing the pay of the Roman army for a year.