Interamna Nahars

(Terni)

A city in the Sabine country of central Italy (now Umbria), forty-five miles north of Rome. Necropoleis in the Nar valley date back to the early Iron Age (tenth to seventh centuries BC), and an inscription gives the city the legendary foundation date of 673/2.

In 83/2 Interamna was put up for auction by Sulla, as a penalty for having supported his Marian enemies in the civil war. A more permanent hazard was its situation beside the confluence of the rivers Nar (Nera) and Velinus (Serra), since the two streams, although producing exceptionally fertile soil, created a continual danger of floods. The famous Falls of Terni (Cascata delle Marmore), still to be seen today, originate from a channel cut by Manius Curius Dentatus, conqueror of the Sabines (271 BC), by which the waters of the Velinus were thrown over a precipice into the Nar, to drain the Veline lake and prevent inundation—with unsatisfactory results, however, which later prompted furious objections from Reate (Rieti) (54 BC, AD 15).

Interamna became a flourishing municipium which lay, we are told by Tacitus, a little way off the Via Flaminia leading to the north, although an earlier northward route may have passed through the city, and an alternative road did so later. In AD 193, when the senate abandoned the transient emperor Didius Julianus in favor of Septimius Severus—who had invaded Italy from the north—a delegation consisting of one hundred of its members was sent to Interamna to convey good wishes to the invader. Severus, surrounded by a bodyguard of six hundred, had each of the envoys searched for concealed arms, but on the next day presented them with monetary gifts and gave them permission to enter Rome in his entourage. In 253 a battle at Interamna Nahars (or, according to another source, at Forum Flaminii near Fulginia [Foligno]) brought about another forcible change of rulers, when Aemilius Aemilianus, governor of Lower Moesia, rose against Trebonianus Gallus (who had been emperor for the past two years) and marched on Italy. In the engagement that followed, Gallus' soldiers abandoned and killed their leader and his son, and transferred their allegiance to Aemilianus. Later in the same year, however, when Valerianus, commander of the Rhine army, likewise rebelled, Aemilianus, too, was assassinated by his troops, a few miles away from the site of his predecessor's murder.

The most important monument of the ancient city is its amphitheater, constructed, according to an inscription, in the time of Tiberius (14–37). Terni is not justified, however, in claiming to be the birthplace of the great historian Tacitus, or his supposed descendants the emperor Tacitus (275/6) and his brother or half-brother Florianus (276). The historian came from elsewhere, and the Historia Augusta's attribution of the third-century pair to the city seems full of fabrications; nor are they likely, for that matter, to be descended from the historian at all. Interamna Nahars (Sabinorum) has to be distinguished from other cities of the same name (or sometimes known as Interamnia and Interamnium) belonging to the tribes of the Aurunci, Praetuttiani and Volsci.