Rome renamed this Italian city because its old name meant bad wind
The Samnite town the Romans captured sounded to Latin ears like Maleventum, bad wind, an unlucky omen. So when they planted a colony there in 268 BC they flipped it to Beneventum, good wind. The rebrand worked: Benevento grew rich on the Appian Way and later ruled much of southern Italy as a Lombard duchy.
Benevento stands on a hill 130 metres up where the Calore and Sabato rivers meet, in Campania. Ancient writers agreed it was very old but not on who founded it. Some credited the Greek hero Diomedes, and in Procopius's day locals displayed what they claimed were the tusks of the Calydonian Boar as proof; another tradition named Auson, a son of Ulysses and Circe. Historically it first appears as a Samnite stronghold that Rome dared not attack in its first two wars against the Samnites.
Rome held it by 274 BC, when the consul Manius Curius Dentatus beat Pyrrhus of Epirus nearby. During the Second Punic War two major clashes happened on its doorstep: Tiberius Gracchus defeated the Carthaginian Hanno in 214 BC, and two years later Quintus Fulvius Flaccus stormed Hanno's camp and its stockpiled grain. Sitting where the Appian Way split toward Apulia and Taranto, it became perhaps the second city of southern Italy after Capua, visited by emperors including Nero and Trajan. The Senate raised the Arch of Trajan there in 114, designed by Apollodorus of Damascus, and it survives as one of Campania's best-preserved Roman monuments.
The Gothic king Totila took the city and tore down its walls in 545. Soon after, Lombard soldiers under Zotto made it the seat of a duchy, traditionally in 576 and apparently independent of the Lombard king. His successor Arechis I seized Capua and Crotone, leaving Byzantium only a scatter of coastal enclaves. The duchy often clashed with the northern Lombard kingdom; King Ratchis even declared Benevento foreign territory requiring royal permission to enter.
When the northern kingdom fell to the Franks in 773, Duke Arechis II restyled himself a prince, and a chronicler called Benevento a second Pavia. The principality then fragmented: Salerno broke away in 851, Capua later went its own way, and Byzantium briefly ruled the city from 891 to 895. Its Santa Sofia church is now part of a UNESCO World Heritage listing of Lombard sites.
Source: Benevento
