The part of Italy that is shaded red is Campania. The Osci lived in the northern area of this region and competed with the Etruscans for full possession of the entire area.

The Osci, which may also be referred to by the names of Opici, Opsci (for the fertility goddess, Ops), and Obsci (Oscans or Opicans in English) were historic inhabitants of Southern Italy dwelling in Northern Campania and ultimately settling in the border region between Latium and Campania. Ops, more properly Opis, ( Latin: "Plenty" was a fertility deity and earth-goddess in Roman mythology of Sabine origin Italy (Italia officially the Italian Republic, (Repubblica Italiana is located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe, and on the two largest Campania is a region of Southern Italy in Europe. The region has a population of around 5 Latium was a region of ancient Italy, home to the original Latin people. They also competed with the Etruscans for possession over Campania. Etruscan civilization is the modern English name given to the culture and way of life of a people of ancient Italy

Antichus, who was generally regarded as Thucydides' source for western history, later identified this tribe with the Ausones (Aurunci) who had been conquered and scattered into Campania and elsewhere by the Sabelli. Thucydides ( C 460 BC &ndash C 395 BC) ( Greek Θουκυδίδης Thoukydídēs) was a Greek Sabellians is a collective Ethnonym for a group of Italic peoples or tribes inhabiting central Italy at the time of the rise of Rome. The Oscan name survived through this scattering because the language that they spoke was called Oscan as well. Oscan, the language of the Osci, is in the Sabellic branch of the Italic language family, which is a branch of Indo-European that also includes

Conflict and subjugation

In the beginning of the 5th century B. C. , the Osci fought Rome for the Ager Pomptinus, the region in Latium between mons Abanus and the coast of the mare Tyrrhenum. Rome ( Roma ˈroma Roma is the capital city of Italy and Lazio, and is Italy's largest and most populous city with more than 2 Being that the Osci were farmers and the Ager Pomptinus contained very fertile land, this area would have been very valuable to them. However, the Osci suffered a devastating defeat at the hands of the Romans.

Later in the 5th century, the Samnites (Samnium), a warlike people who also spoke Oscan, took over the Oscan region and subjugated the Osci. Samnium ( Oscan: Safinim; Italian Sannio) is a historical region of the south central Apennines in Italy, that was home to the

Subsequently, during the 1st Samnite War (343-341 BC), Rome gained control of Northern Campania. The First, Second, and Third Samnite wars, between the early Roman Republic and the tribes of Samnium, extended over half a century involving According to Livy, the Osci were somewhat the cause of the 1st Samnite War. Titus Livius (traditionally 59 BC &ndash AD 17 known as Livy in English, was a Roman historian who wrote a monumental history of Rome He states that it began because the Samnites made an unprovoked attack on the Sidicines (an Oscan canton in Northern Campania). This caused the Sidicines to run to Campania for safety. The Samnites then attacked the Campanians, defeated them, and drove them back within their own walls. In desperation the Osci asked for help from the Romans. They were then under Rome’s control.

• However,the 1st Samnite War is thought to be fiction of the annalistic tradition, meaning that many of the later annalists of Roman history fabricated aspects of certain events (even the events themselves) for patriotic reasons. Annalists (from Latin annus, year hence annales, sc libri, annual records is the name given to a class of writers on Roman history

References

• "Oscans". Brill's New Pauly Encyclopedia of the Ancient World II. (2003). Ed. Cancik, Hubert, and Helmuth Schneider. Leiden: Brill Academic Publisher. ISBN 90-0412259-1.  

• Caspari, M. O. B. (1911), The Etruscans and the Sicilian Expedition of 414-413 B.C., pp. 113-115, <http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0009-8388%28191104%291%3A5%3A2%3C113%3ATEATSE%3E2.0.CO%3B2-%23> .

• Hornblower, Simon & Spawforth, Anthony, eds. (2003), Oxford Classical Dictionary (Revised) (3rd ed. ), Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-198-66172-X .

• Livy (1990), “History of Rome”, in Lewis, Naphtali & Reinhold, Meyer, Roman Civilization: The Republic and the Augustan Age, vol. I (3rd ed. ), New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 81-85, ISBN 0-231-07131-0 .