Aequer
The Aequer were a people living in Italy in antiquity , whose name appears in Livy as an opponent of Rome in the first three centuries.
They inhabited the upper valleys of the Anio and the Tolenus and Himella , mountain rivers that flow northwards to the Nar . In the wars against Rome in the 5th century BC The mountain range of Algidus appears several times as a gathering point of the Aequer and the Volscians allied with them . It is reported that their main settlement area was taken over by the Romans around 484 BC. They were conquered for the first time in the 2nd century BC and again around 90 years later, but that they could not be finally subjected until the end of the Second Samnite War (around 300 BC) when they were apparently given a limited form of say.
All that is known about the political conditions that followed is that the populations of Cliternia and Nersae appeared as a unified res publica Aequiculorum , which was an ordinary municipium . The Latin colonies of Alba Fucens (304 BC) and Carsioli (298 BC) must have spread the use of Latin over the entire area through which the main (and at times the only) route ( Via Valeria ) led to Luceria and the south.
The language of the Aequer prior to the Roman conquest is unknown; but since the Martians further east in the 3rd century BC Speaking a dialect closely related to Latin, just like the Hernics , their neighbors in the southwest, there is no reason to exclude any of these tribes from the Latin group . If one could be certain of the origin of the q in their name and the relationships between the short and long forms (the i in Aequiculus is long - which seems to relate to the locative of aequum (plane), so that the name resides in the Plain could mean - although in historical times they lived mainly in the mountains), one would know whether they belonged to the group of q or p dialects, that is, whether they belonged to Latin, which retained the original q , or to the dialect of Velitrae , which is usually called Volskish (the Volscians were always allies of the Aequer), in which, as with the Iguvinian tablets and the Samnite dialects, the original q was changed to a p . There is no definitive evidence as to whether the q in Latin aequus is an Indo-European q as in Latin quis , Umbro-Volski pis , or an Indo-European k + u as in equus ( Umbrian ekvo- ). The derived adjective Aequicus it seems more likely the Volscian as the Sabini to you, but it is not clear whether this adjective ever as a real Ethnikon was used; the name of the tribe is always Aequi or Aequicoli.
Towards the end of the republic, the Aequer appeared under the name Aequiculi or Aequicoli, organized as a municipium , their territory being the upper reaches of the Salto , now known as Cicolano . It is likely that they lived in their villages as before, the most important of which was Nersae, the modern Nescè. The polygonal terraced ramparts, a remarkable number of which still existed in the district, were described in Römische Mitteilungen (1903), 147f.
literature
- Christian Hülsen : Aequi, Aequiculi . In: Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Antiquity Science (RE). Volume I, 1, Stuttgart 1893, Col. 597 f.
- Enrico Benelli: The Aequi. In: Gary D. Farney, Guy Bradley (Eds.): The Peoples of Ancient Italy. De Gruyter, Boston / Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-1-61451-520-3 , pp. 499-507.
