Lucuidonenses Erotic

The Lucuidonenses were an ancient people of northern Sardinia, named by the geographer Ptolemy in the second century AD and long since absorbed into the Romanized population of the island. Their descendants, as far as anyone can tell, are the modern Sardinians of the Monte Acuto and Logudoro country. Almost everything known about them hangs on a single place. Ptolemy sets them south of the Carenses and Cunusitani and north of the Aesaronenses. Their name matches Luguido, written Luguidunec in the Antonine Itinerary, a station on the Roman road that ran down the interior of the island toward Caralis, today's Cagliari. That station is identified with the site of Nostra Signora di Castro near Oschiri, above what is now Lake Coghinas in the province of Sassari.

That tells you what kind of people they were: inland Sardinians, living in the hill country behind the coast, in a zone Rome found worth garrisoning. A fort stood at Luguido under the early empire, held by auxiliary cohorts whose job was to police the road and watch the highland communities that had resisted first Carthage and then Rome for centuries. The Lucuidonenses were probably one of the smaller communities within or alongside the Balares, the larger people ancient writers place in this part of the north, though no source says so outright. Their language would have been a form of Paleo-Sardinian, the unclassified pre-Latin speech of the island, which survives only in place names and a scatter of words in modern Sardinian. Their ancestors built the nuraghi, the stone towers that still crowd the surrounding countryside, and practiced a religion centered on sacred wells and springs, of which they left no written account. The resemblance between Luguidunec and the Celtic Lugdunum names of the continent has tempted some scholars, but nothing else connects these people to Celts, and it may be coincidence.

What became of them is the ordinary story of provincial Sardinia. Latin replaced the old language and the fort became a settlement. By the Middle Ages the same spot was the seat of the bishops of Castro in the Giudicato of Torres, and the Romanesque church still stands there. One of several proposed origins for the regional name Logudoro traces it back to Luguido. If that is right, this obscure tribe is the namesake of the Sardinian heartland and of Logudorese, the variety often treated as the most conservative form of the Sardinian language. Either way, the Lucuidonenses are a reminder that Ptolemy's bare list of names stood for real communities with territory, roads and neighbors.