Hirpini reason we can't fix the exact period when the Romans subjugated them, but it must have been before 268 BC, when the Romans established their colony at Beneventum, a position that likely was the military key to the possession of their country. In the Second Punic War, the Hirpini appear as an independent people, acting apart from the rest of the Samnites. Livy expressly uses the name of Samnium in contradistinction to the land of the Hirpini. The latter people was one of those that declared in favour of Hannibal immediately after the battle of Cannae, 216 BC; but the
Religion in ancient Rome Venus was brought from Sicily and installed in a temple on the Capitoline hill. The disasters of the early part of Rome's second Punic War were attributed, in Livy's account, to a growth of superstitious cults, errors in augury and the neglect of Rome's traditional gods, whose anger was expressed directly in Rome's defeat at Cannae (216 BC). The Sibilline books were consulted. They recommended a general vowing of the "ver sacrum" and in the following year, the burial of two Greeks and two Gauls; not the first or the last of its kind, according to Livy. The introduction of