What was the fate of the city destroyed for opposing the Roman Empire?

A Roman city razed to the ground more than 2,000 years ago after a rebellion was so badly damaged that it was "uninhabited for more than 170 years", until it was converted into an ancient landfill, according to archaeologists who excavated the ancient site in Italy.

The ruins at Fregellae, about 90 km southeast of Rome, date from the siege and destruction of the city by Roman troops in 125 BC.

The reason for the rebellion is unknown, but archaeologists believe it was because the people of Fregellae demanded full Roman citizenship, rather than "second-class" citizenship - with fewer legal rights, especially regarding ownership of public land, which they had been granted by the Roman Republic.

This long-running dispute culminated in a war about a generation later, from 91 to 87 BC, when many of Rome's allies in Italy demanded and received full Roman citizenship.

Archaeologists excavating a villa in Fregellae built about 80 years before the city was besieged and burned by the Romans in 125 BC (Photo: Dominik Maschek/LEIZA)

However, there are very few historical documents that survive from the time of the Fregellae rebellion , so archaeological studies are the best option to determine what happened there, said Dominik Maschek, professor of Roman archaeology at the Leibniz Center for Archaeology and the University of Trier, in Germany.

Ancient Roman Villa

Italian archaeologists first excavated the site in the 1980s and discovered the remains of murals, floor mosaics, houses and public baths, Maschek explained.

He and a team of researchers from Germany, Italy and Switzerland have been excavating a villa on the edge of the ancient city for the past three years; and last year they also found the remains of a Roman military camp nearby, protected by a fortified wall and a moat.

Among the artifacts found at the site of what is believed to be the villa are large ceramic jars for storing agricultural produce. These, along with ancient seeds unearthed at the site, suggest that the villa was an agricultural centre producing wine, fruit and grain, possibly for export to other regions and overseas. Records of similar Roman villas suggest that up to 50 people may have worked there, many of them enslaved.

However, he said, a layer of fire damage suggests the villa and its crops were destroyed at the same time as the neighboring city—a determination reinforced by evidence of pottery shards from the time of the rebellion.

Ancient Allies

Fregellae was a Roman colony , but it appears to have included many people who were descendants of the Samnites, a non-Roman people who originally lived in the area and were initially enemies of the Roman Empire.

Maschek notes that the issue of Samnite migration to Fregellae had been discussed by the Roman Senate some 60 years before the revolt, but the Senate decided that the city of Fregellae should deal with the influx itself.