It's more than a little bit of a stretch to call Sulla's campaign against the Samnites (and the Lucanians, whom Wikipedia seems to casually ignore) "ethnic cleansing" or "genocide." It's total nonsense. I question whether the writer of the Wikipedia article has ever actually read the texts that are referred to, as he claims that Sulla "conducted an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Sabines, after which they disappeared from history," citing Strabo as his source. Not only does the author confuse the Samnites with the Sabines, two peoples who have absolutely zero relationship with one another, but it's a completely fraudulent claim on both counts. Neither the Sabines nor the Samnites "disappeared from history"--many of the prominent families of Rome, including the gens Claudia, were Sabine, and the OCD lists Augustus' program of urbanizing the Samnites as incredibly successful. From the OCD: "Under Augustus, however, municipalization of the region (see municipium) greatly advanced (e.g. Saepinum), and from the late 1st cent. ad, men of Samnite stock were increasingly to be found in the senate." Nor does Strabo at any point describe either a policy of anything resembling "ethnic cleansing" or that the Samnites (or Sabines, depending on what the addled mind of the author of that page means) "disappeared from history." Strabo 5.4.11, which the author of the page cites, says that Sulla would not stop his proscriptions πρὶν ἢ πάντας τοὺς ἐν ὀνόματι Σαυνιτῶν διέφθειρεν ἢ ἐκ τῆς Ἰταλίας ἐξέβαλε, "until he had either killed or exiled from Italy all the famous Samnites." Strabo's not talking about a targeted destruction of the Samnite people, he's talking about Samnite nobles being included in Sulla's general policy of proscribing the wealthy and politically influential--there's nothing there about anybody but the principes being targeted by the proscriptions. I might as well say that if the British had rounded up and executed the Continental Congress that that would have been an act of "ethnic cleansing" against the colonials, to use a somewhat deliberately absurd analogy. That same passage of Strabo's mentions a slaughter of a couple thousand prisoners of the battle that Sulla fought against the Samnites when they attempted to march on Rome--the only other Samnites mentioned as being killed in that passage are those killed during the battle itself. That's not ethnic cleansing, that's normal battle procedure, people die during battles. Strabo's statement that the Samnite cities were by his time reduced to villages is erroneous--the OCD makes it clear that Samnium was at no time ever fully urbanized. It's not that they were reduced to that, it's that they were always primarily rural--and Strabo mentions several Samnite cities as "doing well" (Βενεουεντὸν δ᾽ ὅμως συνέστηκεν εὖ καὶ Ὀυενουσία, "But nevertheless Beneventum has managed well, as has Venusia"--both of these are pretty good sized cities and are still of importance today)!

Strabo is also a terrible source for Sulla's campaign against the Samnites--or, more appropriately, the Samnite campaign against the Romans. Plutarch describes the action against the Samnites much better, and it's ludicrously absurd that the article on Wikipedia does not cite Plutarch once. The Samnites had sided, under their "praetor" Telesinus, with Marius and had been stubborn holdouts throughout the Social War. Telesinus failed to relieve Marius' son at Praeneste and massed his troops together with the Lucanians under Lamponius for a march on Rome instead. Plutarch says that he camped within ten stades (about two kilometers) of the Colline gate (on the northeastern side of the city) and defeated a levy sent out against him led by Appius Claudius. Sulla's vanguard, with Balbus leading the cavalry, force-marched to the city and attacked without waiting, even though Sulla's officers urged him to allow the men to rest. After the battle Sulla pursued them to Antemnae, a Latin city up the Tiber from Rome, where the Samnites had retreated. There three thousand of the city's inhabitants met him to sue for mercy and ask him not to assault their city--he released these with the promise that they stir up revolt in the city. The city slaughtered itself and the Samnite troops within, and the survivors of both sides, about six thousand says Plutarch, were apparently put to death in the circus (Strabo says that there were three or four thousand survivors and that Sulla had his soldiers slaughter them at the Villa Publica in the Campus Martius). That, with a little comment at the end of the passage from Plutarch about how the Romans realized they had only traded the tyranny of Marius for that of Sulla, marks the end of Plutarch's mention of Sulla's actions against the Samnites, and Strabo's comments about the proscriptions have already been shown to not be intended as an indication that the Samnites were particularly targeted. Sulla didn't even march into Samnium, Antemnae was a Latin city. That Wikipedia article is complete garbage