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Petelia, a Bruttian town of Oscan origin, earned an unusual place in the history of the Second Punic War by holding out against Hannibal for an extraordinary length of time — ancient sources, including Livy, record a siege so prolonged and desperate that the town's inhabitants were reduced to eating leather and grass before finally capitulating around 214–213 BC. Rome's failure to relieve them became a source of lasting shame. These bronzes were struck in the final years before or during that siege, which gives even the most worn survivors a specific historical weight that the catalog numbers alone cannot convey.