While there have been numerous books on the cultural landscape of Italy covering the period before, during and after the Roman conquest, few have attempted as comprehensive a coverage as the present volume. Previous volumes have tended either to focus on specific geographical regions or to omit some of the peoples for whom the surviving evidence is slight. Farney and Bradley avoid both of these shortcomings. The two major islands of modern Italy, Sardinia and Sicily, are eschewed for the justifiable reason that they were not considered part of Italy by the Romans. Otherwise, every part of peninsular and continental Italy is addressed. This breadth of coverage is one of the major strengths of the volume, and the editors are to be congratulated for their ambition in undertaking such a mammoth task. To achieve their objective, the editors have assembled a vibrant mix of contributors that includes some of the best-known names in the field and a scattering of the most talented early-career scholars working on pre- and early Roman Italy.
The editors have given free range to their contributors in terms of approach to the material, which has both positive and negative consequences. On the plus side, there is no attempt to impose an orthodoxy on either the material itself or on the team of scholars discussing it. On the downside, it means that different, and often neighbouring, peoples and regions can be approached in quite divergent ways.
The scope and importance of the volume is increased and significantly enhanced by fifteen thematic essays which deal with topics that are of relevance to all or most of the geographical areas and peoples discussed. These essays cover: technical issues, such as epigraphy, linguistics and numismatics; historical topics, including demography, economy, religion, the Roman conquest, the role of Italians in the Roman army as well as the Second Punic and Social Wars; and theoretical debates on, inter alia, ethnicity, colonisation and Romanisation, and how Italy was interpreted through the lens of Greek myth.
The focus on the peoples of ancient Italy is undoubtedly Romano-centric in that, in many cases, it is far from certain that the people in question identified themselves in the same way as the Romans conceived of them. Roman and Greek authors discussed Rome's emergence to a hegemonic position in Italy as a series of interactions, both military and diplomatic, with various peoples who occupied the different regions of Italy. These peoples are characterised as political agents, who wage war and form alliances, with each other and with Rome. The sources attach a set of stereotypes to many of these peoples, as fierce, warlike hill-dwellers. Although such characterisations are mostly negative, they can occasionally be recast positively in terms of adherence to austere lifestyles, as in the case of the Sabines (Farney and G. Masci, p. 551). Notwithstanding the tone of the sources, the characterisation of Rome's adversaries as powerful political groups with a strong militaristic culture sets them up as worthy, if sometimes ignoble, opponents in Rome's relentless rise to imperial dominance. The papers in this volume not only show that Rome's rise was neither inevitable nor accidental, as Roman sources liked to imply, but also that the peoples of ancient Italy had highly sophisticated cultures, which were, like Rome, heavily interconnected across Italy and the wider Mediterranean.
The focus on peoples, however, privileges one dimension of ancient identities, and not necessarily that which was most prominent in the minds of the ancient populations. For many of the peoples, the sources preserve the names of numerous tribes, which appear to operate below the level of the people: a good example would be the tribes that made up the Galli in Northern Italy (R. Haeussler, p. 722). It is far from clear that the tribal level of identity was always or automatically subaltern to that of the people. This line of reasoning may be taken further. The primary locus of identity for many individuals may have been that of the local community, be that urban or otherwise. So, for example, in the Iguvine Tables (VIb, 52–5) the people of Iguvium (modern Gubbio) express enmity towards the Tadinate people, who were probably fellow Umbrians.
As Bradley and J. Hall (p. 193) point out, warfare was frequent and widespread across Italy in pre-Roman times but most of these conflicts would have been small-scale and strictly local disputes between neighbouring communities. Thus, it is far from clear that viewing ancient Italy as a land dominated by the peoples, discussed in ancient sources, is the most appropriate way to imagine the cultural and political landscape of the time. Moreover, identity is a fluid concept. Not only could different scales of identity, local, subregional, regional etc., be privileged when circumstances dictated, but identities could change and communities could and did re-invent themselves. Indeed, the very concept of Italia may be a reaction to the emerging dominance of Rome (F. Santangelo, pp. 238–40). The editors briefly touch on the relevance of discussing ancient peoples in their introduction (p. 2), but leave it to the individual contributors to decide on the extent to which it is addressed in the various chapters, with the result that some remain entirely silent on the matter.
A further and no less significant complication is that the chapters on the peoples deal with both historical sources and archaeological remains. However, there is no reason why there should be neat correlations between the ethno-political entities described in the sources and the material culture from the regions that they were said to inhabit. As the contributors have been allowed autonomy in their approach, the responses to this issue are quite varied. Thus, for example, D. Yntema discusses Apulia as a geographical entity and identifies five different cultural zones, whereas the majority of sources describe three peoples from the area. By contrast, L. Cappelletti's approach to Calabria is very much framed by the historical sources for the Bruttii. Ultimately, there is no like-for-like comparison between the political entities discussed by ancient writers and the material culture record for the various regions of ancient Italy, but that does not mean that one cannot usefully put the various sources side-by-side to gain a better understanding of Italy's non-Roman cultures.
The primary value of the volume lies in the fact that it offers up-to-date surveys of the current state of scholarship for all the different regions of ancient Italy. For many areas, such as Umbria, our knowledge has been revolutionised in recent years both by new archaeological work and/or the publication and re-evaluation of historical excavations. Not all this information is readily available to the Anglophone readership at whom the book is aimed.
The decision to give the contributors as much freedom as possible has many positive consequences, although it has resulted in a few terminological inconsistencies between the different chapters. Similarly, a few of the chapters written by non-native speakers would have benefited from a more thoroughgoing effort to render their prose into idiomatic English. These are minor quibbles, however, as most readers will not approach the volume in the way that a reviewer must. Rather than reading it from cover to cover, most of those who use the book will seek out the contributions dealing with the specific regions and/or peoples of particular interest to their studies and supplement these with a selection from the thematic chapters. Using such an approach, most readers will find themselves well served by this hefty tome.
