It’s almost a year since we inaugurated our museum, so we decided to visit again two of the most important archaeological sites we had already written about – the probable and still unearthed site of an ancient Roman township, at Pratola of Tressanti rural district (in Montecalvo Irpino territory); and the most important excavation of Aequum Tuticum, at Sant’Eleuterio rural district (in Ariano Irpino territory).
As regards the first of them, we only say that we have now a photographic evidence regarding the vandalic destruction of the stone tablet at the head of a rural fountain on which was engraved a Latin epigraph, a very precious one for the historic information it handed down to us (see Photogallery and the first item in The Index).
As regards Aequum Tuticum, we already knew, as we were approaching its site, that the “plough/archaeologist” had once again dug up an artefact, a thing rarely occurring there as a result brought about by the official human archaeologists’ endeavour. The finding is just now kept secret, but we were informed about it thanks to an Arianese cultural association’s tract. That is, that a tractor had dug up a square limestone base with, on one of its faces, a Latin epigraph tracing back its origin to the times when Aequum Tuticum had become a Roman vicus (a village). The Latin epigraph states the villagers’ gratitude to a certain Quinto Gagilio, who had lavished a “perpetual” donation of money to them, in return for their devotional rites to the memory of his son Quinto Gagilio Modesto, untimely dead.
But there were other things on the premises which demonstrated to us how the site was cared about. First, the information notice for visitors was lying discarded at outskirts of the tilled soil around the site (see Photogallegy); and second, the notice informed only briefly on Aequum Tuticum’s past as a Roman vicus, ignoring altogether its prehistoric and historic relevance, first, as a most important station along the thanshumance trail connecting the Abruzzi mountains to the Apulia plain; and later on, as a southern capital of the Samnite federation, as suggested by the most learned historians, such as E.T. Salmon (see the Essential Bibliography).
The meaning of the adjective tuticum is “pertaining to the touto”, an Oscan word for “people”, which is analogous to the Latin populus, whose legal and political meaning was “the gathering of all the free men bearing arms”. An analogous place to Aequum Tuticum was the Campus Martius, in Rome. Consequently, a clear translation of Aequum Tuticum is “the plain, or the open space (this is the meaning of Aequum) where the Samnite tribes, the local Hirpini included, gathered their federate forces to wage war, subscribe peace, and at the same time, seek their magistrates/priests’ (meddices) vaticination.