This brutal piece of ethnic cleansing set the tone for what followed, which was not far short of civil war: ‘It can be called a war against socii, to lessen the odium of it; the truth is it was a civil war, against citizens,’ as one Roman historian later summed it up. And it involved fighting throughout much of the peninsula, including at Pompeii, where the marks of the battering by Roman artillery in 89 BCE can be seen even now
