The Romans have no common national name for the Sabines and the tribes which are supposed to have issued from them: the latter, whether Marsians and Pelignians, or Samnites and Lucanians, they term Sabellians. That these tribes called themselves Savini or Sabini, is nearly certain from the inscription on the Samnite Denarius coined in the Social war; at least as to the Samnites, whose name is in every form manifestly, and in the Greek Σανῖται directly, derived from Savini: but the usage of a people whose writings have perished, like every thing that is extinct in fact, has lost its rights. I think myself at liberty to employ the term Sabellians for the whole race; since the tribes which were so named by the Romans, are far more important than the Sabines; and it would clearly have offended a Latin ear, to have called the Samnites Sabines: for investigations like those of this history a general name is indispensable.

When Rome crossed the frontiers of Latium, the Sabellians were the most widely extended and the greatest people in Italy the Etruscans had already sunk, as they had seen the nations of earlier greatness sink, the Tyrrhenians, Umbrians, and Ausonians. As the Dorians were great in their colonies, the mother-country remaining little; and as it lived in peace, while the tribes it sent forth diffused themselves widely by conquests and settlements; so, according to Cato, was it with the old Sabine nation.