Tara Welch's study of Tarpeia is a thoughtful and engaging account of this rather neglected figure, the treacherous young woman who opened Rome's walls to the attacking Sabines during the reign of Romulus. In this treatment, Tarpeia becomes a case study for myth-interpretation that repudiates the goal of a definitive analysis. W. describes her approach as ‘staunchly synchronic’ (9), and looks for explanations of the myth not in putative origins or evolution, but in the resonances which each retelling has with social and political issues of the period in which it was produced. So the book consists of a series of synchronic studies that themselves build into a diachronic interpretation. Throughout, W. is eager to avoid pinning down the significance of the story, aiming rather for an account that keeps a range of responses alive, even though these are sometimes hard to historicize. W. grants a stabilizing rôle to the act of writing or representing. But such stabilization can never eliminate the pluralities inherent within the myth, for which it then produces more. So W.’s analysis can range widely without losing touch with its central themes. A preliminary chapter outlines them: moral problems centred on gender, money and national identity. The book then examines nine renderings of Tarpeia: Fabius Pictor (ch. 2), coinage (ch. 3), Varro (ch. 4), Livy (ch. 5), Propertius (ch. 6), Valerius Maximus (ch. 7), Simylus (ch. 8), Dionysius of Halicarnassus (ch. 9) and Plutarch (ch. 10). The brief conclusion contains less canonical material that reinforces the mutability of the central character in later periods, and situates W.’s own project within a tradition.

As the first account, Fabius Pictor's has an important place in W.’s argument, and W. boldly circumvents the problems posed by a text so badly preserved. Specialists in the annalistic tradition will have their own views; while some will accept W.’s confidence to analyse Pictor as described by Dionysius, others will be more sceptical. Had W. devoted more care to methodological self-justification, that result would not have been different. That said, the book does not seem to be aimed at the specialist, although it is not easy to say who the intended readers are. They care about Fabius Pictor, but are unable to locate Hannibal without an explanatory gloss, while Cincius Alimentus requires no such explanation (45). Later on, they will need a Greek text of Dionysius to be able to evaluate W.’s argument (243). These may just be manifestations of an energetic style, with precision an occasional sacrifice. At the same time, I would hesitate to recommend to students a book that introduces Fabius Pictor as if his text could be read directly (45–8), and, although then describing his tradition (48–50), is able to say that, ‘the historian seems to confront greed in many forms throughout his history’ (68). This is the dark underbelly of the backlash against Quellenkritik, and as an approach, has as much, or as little, to recommend it. In similar vein, can we really take Livy's account of the debate over the Lex Oppia as reliable enough for the job that W. requires of it, that is to link Pictor's vision of a greedy Tarpeia to a widespread concern with female materialism? These are problems specific to the discussion of the mid-Republic, but in this area too, the creativity of W.’s readings can outweigh scepticism. Arguments about an increase in women's political prominence in this period are exciting, as is an excursus on gender and materialism at Tarentum (70–5); illuminating, even though tangential to, the central topic.

The next chapter forges a link between the next annalistic landmark, Calpurnius Piso Frugi, and coins minted during the Social War. This produces a nuanced social history, connecting money to politics and religion, in which Tarpeia acts as a focus for debates about economics and national identity. In a dramatic final sentence, W. imagines that the striker of the coin depicting Tarpeia's death ‘became a Sabine, crushing Tarpeia anew to the service of a pluralistic Rome’ (102). Stimulating close readings of a section of De lingua latina and the friezes from the Basilica Aemilia make up the next chapter, with W. exploring the political and mythographic ramifications of the analogy/anomaly controversy. The iconographic discussion brings this fascinating monument to life in a new way. These friezes are, incidentally, no longer in the National Museum in Palazzo Massimo alle Terme (125); they have been rehoused in the Curia Julia. The complexities of the exemplum mind-set are sharply tackled in chapters on Livy and Valerius Maximus, and the theme of treachery that links Tarpeia to Sejanus makes clear the gains of W.’s ambitions. These are separated by a chapter dominated by Propertius 4.4, where, building on earlier work, W. explores ‘the challenge and cost of belonging’ (168) in the Augustan period. The short chapter on Simylus, a poet known only from two four-line quotations in Plutarch, Romulus, is less convincing, although W. does as much as is possible with these unpromising fragments. The conclusion, that this retelling foreshadows what we see more clearly in Dionysius and Plutarch, ‘Greeks trying to understand and come to grips with Rome through Rome's history and myth’ (238), reveals a problem with W.’s approach. The diachronic analysis, although fully alert to recent scholarly currents, does depend upon a pre-existing framework of ideas about what Rome's expansion means, and how it will be charted in a myth. So, although W.’s readings are often striking and imaginative, in the end, Tarpeia's story over time does not contain many surprises, either about the ideologies that gave rise to the myth, or about its development.