Time, space, and the use of material evidence and literary sources

The imposing timeframe of D.'s study is matched by T.'s book, which starts in the early 1st millennium BCE and ends at some point before the Social War. Thus, both studies present a convincing case for looking carefully at the complex threads of continuity, tradition, and structural resilience which, despite significant transformations on the political level, linked Republican Rome with the Early Iron Age and the Archaic period. Moreover, both authors are to be given credit for the careful way in which these links are presented and used in their narratives, which stand in marked contrast to the primordialist idea of a “national” or “ethnic” character of “Italic” or “Roman” art and architecture that was so prolific in many works of the first half of the 20th c. well into the 1960s.Footnote ⁵ With respect to her book's spatial setting, D. focuses on the city of Rome and its urban topography, a field with a long and protracted history of scholarship. T., by contrast, proposes shifting the focus from Rome toward the entire Apennine peninsula and partly even a Mediterranean-wide setting, with a certain predilection for case studies from Latium, Etruria, Campania, and Samnium. In doing so, he is clearly in line with a number of important recent studies that have argued for moving away from traditional Romano-centric narratives in favor of multivocality and regional diversity.Footnote ⁶ His approach will surely also touch a nerve with those whose work has been influenced by new ways of conceptualizing Roman attitudes toward empire and space.Footnote ⁷

Whereas D. presents and discusses even the scantest architectural remains in a neat chronological sequence, T. is mostly interested in the big picture and macro-patterns of material culture, with only a few in-depth archaeological analyses of concrete sites, monuments, or artifacts. Key to his argument are structural factors, such as settlement patterns and the number of rural sites. The consequences of this approach are far-reaching and become particularly evident in his discussion of Roman colonies. Referring to the cases of Caere and Alsium, T. states that

Here, the assumption is clearly that, if “local elites were involved in the process of integration,” Roman colonization could barely have been an aggressive strategy which led to the disruption of traditional ways of life. This is interesting, as it runs against the literary sources, especially Polybius and Livy, who for the 3rd- and 2nd-c. colonies in northern Italy and Liguria paint a very different picture of deserted places, constant attacks, and prolonged fighting, which all indicate that the locals did not quite appreciate the Roman presence.Footnote ⁹ Moreover, the studies on more recent cases of colonialism used by T., including R. White's work on the “Middle Ground” in the Great Lakes region, show very clearly that “the involvement [or rather: collaboration] of local elites” is a common feature in such processes of aggressive expansion, including the establishment of firm ties of allegiance and friendship between colonizers and local elite groups, but that this in itself does not justify a revisionist reading: new settlements were planted into newly conquered (or claimed) territory as essentially an act of aggression, not “integration.”Footnote ¹⁰ Although focusing on the “natives” or “indigenous” peoples and communities has become fashionable in recent scholarship on Roman colonization,Footnote ¹¹ we should not forget the perspective of the incoming Roman settlers, who were organized along the lines of the citizen census, first and foremost as soldier-farmers, and who, more often than not in starkly inferior numbers, were meant to eke out a living from the agricultural territory surrounding their newly founded colonial settlement. The elevated level of elite peer–polity interactions seems rather far removed from the realities of such a life, which would have been primarily based on subsistence farming in family units, with short life expectancy and regular participation in warfare.

In these and other cases T. often presupposes that a consistent number of archaeological sites before and after a colony's deduction indicates the essential stability of the rural communities living in the area, with changes happening only at the top of the social hierarchy. However, we could equally take the archaeological data as indicative of a certain general way of settling and working the land, while not actually telling us whether new owners or occupiers would have moved in at a certain point. In T.'s reading, material culture here seems to paint a picture of stability and continuity, but this is largely a product of the type of material he uses: settlement and agriculture are drawn-out processes which rely upon and leave behind a lot in terms of solid structural evidence, as opposed to the sharp but often not primarily material effects of violence, which are much more difficult to trace.Footnote ¹² On a different level, it is also interesting to see that in T.'s hyper-realist reading of elite clans dominating Rome and central Italy one crucial aspect is barely discussed: religion. Surely, when assessing the driving forces behind Roman expansion, one should not forget the role of communal sanctuaries and rituals, such as the lustratio of the Roman army in the campus Martius or the foundation offerings for Roman colonies, as well as the treatment of cult statues in conquered cities, and the various religious stipulations for land surveyors.Footnote ¹³

A final consideration of a more methodological nature concerns the use of literary sources in D.'s and T.'s books. Again, it seems fair to view their respective approaches as almost diametrically opposed. Writing firmly in the tradition of those working on the monumental topography of Rome, D. draws upon a wealth of ancient texts regarding specific buildings, commissioners, and dates. Overall, this leads to a balanced narrative, although she cannot always avoid the pitfalls which arise from the problematic nature of the accounts for the first 250 years of Republican history.Footnote ¹⁴ T., by contrast, already in the preface distances himself quite vehemently from ancient literary sources.Footnote ¹⁵ Throughout the book, he only refers to selected passages in Livy but not to any other Greek or Roman authors. This, of course, is unfortunate, as the many instances for which he claims there is “solid evidence” or “clear evidence” are only substantiated by vague references to the secondary literature. If his aim was indeed, as stated, to make the book more accessible to a general audience (xiv), this detachment from the primary written sources of Greco-Roman antiquity creates the opposite effect: surely, pointing to modern and accessible translations of authors other than Livy, and in particular Polybius, Dionysius, and Appian, not to mention Varro or Cicero, would not have put off the general reader, but would rather have made them realize that there is indeed a substantial body of texts lurking in the background.

Power, politics, and state formation

The first big theme which permeates both books boils down to a set of simple, but essential questions: What was the nature of political power in Republican Rome and Italy? Did it lie with the elites, or with the people? Should we conceptualize this power as emanating from the center (i.e., Rome), or are we talking about a type of power which was constantly being negotiated in the contact zones at the margins of individual polities?

With respect to Polybius's famous account of the Roman Republican state as a “mixed constitution,” T.'s book clearly focuses on the element of oligarchy.Footnote ¹⁶ Consequently, state formation and the role of institutions, rather than elite families and their members, play a much less important role in his narrative. Although it certainly provides fresh and noteworthy insights, there remain doubts about this radical change of perspective. For example, the establishment of annual magistracies and a voting assembly in Rome, however constricted in reality, must have had a profound influence on the way in which decision-making processes would have worked beyond the personal level of family relations. Moreover, quite often, as in the cases of Veii and Caere (116–17), T. follows the proposition of “players exploiting windows of opportunity,”Footnote ¹⁷ although these windows of opportunity arise more from an abstract conceptual framework (e.g., the idea of a pan-Mediterranean expansion of agriculture in the 5th and 4th c.) than from the archaeological or literary evidence.

This can be illustrated by T.'s discussion of the case of Syracuse. Here, T. claims that the new intensification in land use in the 5th and 4th c. BCE was merely in line with what many Mediterranean city states went through in the same period. However, Syracuse in the later 5th c. is one of the rare cases where we have the account of a contemporary writer, Thucydides, arguably the father of modern historiography, telling us about the impact of a truly cataclysmic conflict in the eastern Mediterranean: the Peloponnesian War. The Athenian way of waging this war fundamentally relied on interstate relations that more often than not overruled conventional aristocratic networks. Syracuse, as we know, was massively afflicted by the Peloponnesian War and by Athenian overseas aggression. Indeed, the Athenian attempt to project power into the central Mediterranean, and in particular the Greek colonies on Sicily, must be seen as a trigger for radical state (re)formation in Syracuse. The same could have been elaborated in more detail for the Celtic incursions into northern and central Italy in the 4th c. BCE and the Gallic sack of Rome, which T. mentions incidentally (e.g., 105–7), but never explores in full. The sudden emergence of massive and unprecedented external threats, in particular from aggressors who were outsiders to the local and regional sociopolitical system, made the need for protection even more urgent and would, in return, have led to reform and change, if the attacked polities were lucky enough to survive the initial attack.

Expanding the agricultural base of a city or city state by intensifying the cultivation of the territory is rightly acknowledged by T. as a delicate undertaking which required new forms or at least a new degree of protection from central institutions, i.e., the state or a leading group (102–5). As mentioned before, he opts to concentrate on the latter, putting the agency of elites at the very center of his model of state formation. Although appealing from an anthropological point of view, this quickly runs into problems when tested against the available literary evidence for Roman Republican institutions. T.'s discussion of the Plautii family and their strong military focus on Privernum can serve as a case in point (174–81). The gist of his argument – that the Plautii had a personal agenda with Privernum which could have had something to do with inner-elite rivalries and the quest for patronage and followers – is convincing. However, in T.'s view, as soon as the Plautii had identified the possibility of acting against Privernum from Rome, they equipped themselves with the military powers of the Roman consulship and thus would have been automatically set on their path to success. T. never explicitly addresses the potential problem that, despite an elite family's perceptive grasp of the opportunities of an expanding territorial state, their members would still have needed to succeed in public elections when facing the voting assemblies, i.e., a disparate body of citizens whose members they would at least partly lead in battle. When T. claims that “the Plautii did not fight to defend or attack a political abstraction, or to acquire loot or means of production,” but rather that “their actions would determine which elite network would be able to count the leaders of the city of Priverno, which was arguably falling into the orbit of Rome anyway, among their clients” (182), he omits the important fact that, in order to pursue this covert agenda of extending their “network,” the Plautii, out of sheer necessity, first had to convince the Roman voters to elect them to the consulship. So, after all, the prolonged conflict with Privernum must have had something to offer the ordinary soldiers, too.

In his final assessment of the episode, T. plausibly explains the rationale of the Plautii to enroll Privernum (and the colony of Fregellae) in the tribus Oufentina as the creation of a coherent political clientela. However, it is hard to follow his suggestion that this would have been a type of gerrymandering with the aim to influence future elections to the consulship: the comitia tributa did not elect the highest magistrates but only magistrates without military high command, in particular the curule aediles (from 367 BCE), the quaestors (from 447 BCE), and the tribuni militum. Therefore, creating new allegiances in the voting tribes would only have benefited junior members of an ambitious elite family like the Plautii; the all-important consular elections could only have been influenced through control of the comitia centuriata, which were organized along the lines of propertied classes. This might seem like nit-picking, but in fact a thorough consideration of the different institutions in Mid- to Late Republican political practice is key for an understanding of the opportunities and constraints that elite families such as the Plautii would have faced in the Roman political arena, versus both their peers and the electorate. If, as T. suggests, Roman expansionism was just an elaborate elite racket, relying on continuous stitch-ups and shady deals, why institute and maintain an intricate system of voting assemblies and popular powers which could potentially disrupt all of this? And what happened to this seemingly absolute power of the elites to coerce their social inferiors after the 4th and 3rd c. BCE?

In contrast to T., D.'s narrative is guided by a largely institutional framework.Footnote ¹⁸ She bases her book on the proposition “that the Republican city [of Rome] and its component buildings were inextricably intertwined with Republican government” (1). Consequently, she meticulously differentiates between manubial, censorial, consular, praetorian, and aedilician building projects, tying the respective commissioners and their works closely to their cursus honorum and victorious military campaigns. In all of this, she gives pride of place to the way in which the commissioners of temples and other public buildings (who without exception stemmed from the Roman senatorial elite) would have acted in their role as magistrates and as members of their peer group. The reader frequently feels tempted to ask: Where are the construction workers, specialists, and day laborers? Where are the entrepreneurs tendering for public contracts whom Polybius so vividly describes?Footnote ¹⁹ D. briefly refers to this important aspect of the Republican construction industry in the context of the Gracchan reforms and potential tribunician building projects (177–80), but otherwise her focus is clearly set on the agency of magistrates and, in Chapters 5–7, on the “great men” of the 1st c. BCE, i.e., Sulla, Pompey, and Caesar.

However, Polybius also reminds us that the power of the Roman elite was far from absolute:

This is a crucial point: consuls could not achieve anything without their soldiers; commissioners of temples and public monuments could not see their works completed without their builders. As elected magistrates relied on the populus in more than one sense, the exertion of political power and control was far from straightforward or unidirectional. This would have been a permanent and structural problem for the Roman army, which was essentially the professional version of a farmers’ militia, but also for all major projects of public construction. In the less urbanized and largely pastoralist areas of the Apennines, people could even vote with their feet and deprive whole communities of fighters and builders, thus seriously eroding the power base of their social betters.Footnote ²¹

In this context, it is revealing to look at the numbers of Roman legions and allied contingents recruited during the 3rd and 2nd c. BCE.Footnote ²² This helps in understanding the human scale of Early to Mid-Republican Roman state formation and expansion, illustrated by the sheer numbers of people involved in this process on an almost yearly basis: if we reckon with two to four legions per consular army, supplemented by roughly equal contingents of socii, then even at a low count of 4,000 per legion we must assume that each consular army in the time of the Samnite Wars would have comprised 8,000 to 16,000 Roman citizens from all property classes, plus the equivalent from allied communities (up to 16,000, again most probably recruited across a range of social groups). This is more than the city state of Athens could conceivably have fielded, even in the days of the “Athenian empire.” From this arises a fundamental question which an elite perspective on the nature of political power in Rome and large parts of Italy during the phase of Republican expansion cannot fully answer: what was the ordinary soldiers’ motivation to fight and risk their lives on a yearly basis?Footnote ²³

Society: elites and non-elites

This brings us to the second big theme, which, often more implicitly than explicitly, constitutes an important undercurrent to both books: Roman society in the Republican period. Given the nature of our evidence, it is perhaps a bit unfair to blame D. and T. for choosing an elite perspective; however, it goes without saying that this choice strongly influences the way in which their interpretations of Roman expansionism and architectural development unfold.

Focusing on the commissioners of Roman Republican architecture, D. stays firmly in the public sphere. This allows her to explore family ambitions and competition among prominent members of the Roman senatorial elite, particularly for the 2nd and 1st c. BCE (Chapters 3–7). It is quite striking, though, that her emphasis on public building obscures important transformations in the domestic sphere. Apart from some passing remarks in the context of the introduction of marble in the mid-2nd c. BCE, the controversies surrounding luxuria in elite houses go largely unmentioned, as do the concomitant issues related to the First and Second Style of wall decoration. This creates the slightly misleading impression that Roman senators mostly competed with each other in the construction of manubial temples and large infrastructure projects, neglecting the rapidly increasing lavishness of status display in urban houses and villas, which becomes archaeologically tangible from the mid-2nd c. BCE onwards.Footnote ²⁴ In this context it is also worth pointing toward M. Mogetta's recent work on the beginnings of Roman concrete, which demonstrates that this new building material made its first appearance in Republican elite houses and was only slightly later adopted in public architecture.Footnote ²⁵

This serves as a poignant reminder that Roman social life cannot be fully conceptualized by looking only at one side of traditional dichotomies, like elites v. masses, or public v. private. It is therefore surprising that T., who elsewhere in his book rightly criticizes the nationalist narratives of Roman expansion propagated by Prussian and German historians (e.g., 18–20), is quick to embrace one of the arguably most elitist strands of scholarship on the Roman Republic: prosopography (157).Footnote ²⁶ This may explain why his view of Roman and Italic elites actually closely resembles the definition provided by one of the great prosopographists, M. Gelzer, who, in 1912, gave the following famous description of the “Roman nobility”:

Putting aside, for the moment, T.'s penchant for anthropological comparanda and theory, it seems fair to ask whether his narrative could not also be justly labeled an “archaeological Gelzer for the 21st c.”

From the perspective of someone working on the Late Republican period, T.'s take on Roman Early to Mid-Republican social structure, if correct, raises the important question of when and how exactly this successful system of elite stitch-ups ceased to work. Why was the secret ballot introduced in the 130s BCE?Footnote ²⁸ Why did “the elite” lose control over the masses? If we follow the incisive model of Keith Hopkins and Graham Burton, they never did – because they had never been able to establish a truly “aristocratic” society in the first place. H. and B. argue that, owing to sheer demographic constraints, the political careers of many Roman elite families would have been far too volatile and fragile to allow for stringent planning across longer periods of time. The institutional framework simply did not allow for this:

The fact that no further members of the Plautii, the protagonists of T.'s case study, rose to political prominence between the end of the 4th c. and the first decades of the 2nd c. BCE illustrates the validity of H.'s argument. Surely, elite negotiations would always have been an important part of Roman internal and external affairs, but they did not provide any kind of success that would have been more sustainable than the institutions of the Republican state. The reasons for this lack of sustainability were not merely demographic in nature. They also sprang from the particular way in which Roman social interaction was tied to personal and institutional relations between magistrates, their peers, and their soldiers-cum-voters. T.'s ultra-realist view of “Roman aristocrats” basically fixing elections and assignments of military command, or even making deals with their opponents and joining in mock battles (72: “some wars could be rigged and piloted beforehand through local contacts”), and ultimately wildly exaggerating their military exploits after their return to Rome, is simply not borne out by what we know from the literary sources. Thousands of soldiers of such a commander would have been able to scrutinize his actions and their representation after the end of a victorious campaign; the measure of success would have depended on the successful distribution of loot and booty among the soldiery. This is not dissimilar to the kind of basic scrutiny a Celtic war leader would have been subjected to in the crucial moment when it was his turn to put on the next massive feast. Under such sociopolitical conditions, success would have been a very tangible thing, and tampering with your own track record would have had potentially detrimental consequences for the respective commanders.

To put these considerations into perspective, it is worth looking into Polybius again, who, after describing the various ties of obligation, and the checks and balances of the Republican system, states that “in no respect is it safe for the consuls to neglect keeping in favor with both the senate and the people.”Footnote ³⁰ This is indeed borne out by several episodes of contested imperatorial acclamations and soldiers protesting against changes in command (e.g., Livy 41, 10, 9).Footnote ³¹ Of course, following T.'s reasoning it would be possible that this was all staged by the elite commanders who pulled the strings and engineered their soldiers’ behavior. But still, this would mean that the generals thought it necessary to manipulate their troops, thus demonstrating that collaboration across social groups was absolutely fundamental for the workings of Roman Republican expansionism. Equally, the distinctive pattern of material culture and architecture in Republican Rome and central Italy ultimately derives from this permanent social balancing act between “the few” and “the many.”

Imperialism and expansion

The third big theme in both books is how Roman Republican expansionism becomes manifest in the archaeological record. In line with traditional accounts of Republican history, D. describes the unfolding of imperialism and conquest as a linear process. Spoils play a key role in her narrative as they were the precondition for building and elite representation in the city of Rome. In this respect, her chapters on the Early and Middle Republic, carefully and painstakingly collating all the available archaeological and literary evidence for manubial building projects in the city of Rome between the later 4th c. and the mid-1st c. BCE, make it abundantly clear that the Roman expansion into Italy and the wider Mediterranean produced revenue on an extraordinary scale. As all of this building activity would have been regulated through institutions and committees, and would ultimately also have needed approval by the citizen body at crucial stages (e.g., in the erection of a temple), this whole process clearly went beyond the capacity of single families.Footnote ³² Quite on the contrary, architectural practice here sheds important light on the process of state formation and institutional development itself. But, on a more structural and socioeconomic level, D.'s focus on the elite's agency and their political motivations only captures one aspect of this process. Recent important studies by S. Bernard and D. Padilla Peralta point the way in a different, and – in terms of historical insight – probably more exciting, direction: not taking construction as merely a reflection of political development and successful military expansion, but seeing it as a crucial productive force in itself which was intrinsically linked to all the other key activities of the Roman state, such as warfare, agriculture, religion, and sociopolitical practice in the widest sense.Footnote ³³

In T.'s book, the familiar story of Roman aggression and conquest looks surprisingly different. In Chapter 5 in particular, T. adopts a stance which is highly critical of state power and the power of institutions. Instead, he shows himself as very much in favor of individual power brokers who were organized in family compounds. This leads him to some very interesting ideas about the possible choices a Roman commander of the 4th and early 3rd c. BCE would have faced when on campaign, reminding us of the rather ill-defined “grand strategy” of the Roman res publica. However, T.'s well-intentioned and avowedly decolonialist move of focusing on the non-Roman agents and their active role in the process of Roman expansion frequently verges upon the brink of backfiring: as with many revisionist narratives, T.'s story, rather than re-endowing the people on the receiving end of Rome's imperialism with their historical importance and dignity, simply denies that the conventional histories got it right. Massacres, deportations, land confiscations? According to him, such acts barely happened and certainly did not have a large impact on the people in the affected areas (e.g., 196–203).

Instead, T. emphasizes the agency of non-Romans by remodeling Roman expansion into Italy as a mixture of a big bargaining process and a stitch-up between Roman and local elite families. This is not to deny that negotiated deals occasionally must have taken place. The famous fresco from the Esquiline tomb of the gens Fabia, aptly chosen for the book's cover, clearly shows scenes of negotiation: but these are only fragments of a much more extensive story which also involves a siege and scenes of close combat. Equally, the neighboring Arieti tomb is decorated with scenes of fighting alongside a triumphal procession; similar depictions can be found on the painted frieze of the tomb of the Scipiones on the Appian Way.Footnote ³⁴ Alongside well-attested cases of looted cities and massacred or enslaved communities (such as at the sack of Tarentum in 272 BCE), this type of archaeological evidence for violence and fighting as an essential part of Roman expansionism and elite ideology would have deserved a more in-depth treatment.Footnote ³⁵

Ultimately, it strikes the reader as odd that, if T.'s reading were correct, Rome would only have started to take a radically aggressive stance toward newly conquered communities when expanding outside Italy: what about archaeologically well-attested cases such as Spanish hillforts of the late 3rd and early 2nd c. BCE, sacked and destroyed by the Romans and never reoccupied until the Middle Ages?Footnote ³⁶ What about constant warfare in northern Italy and Liguria? Why did the Romans not revert to stitch-ups and elite bargaining in these cases? Did they simply become more aggressive after the 4th/mid-3rd c. BCE, or could they only strike such deals with their “ethnic alter-egos” in central and southern Italy? And what, on a more general level, would have led to such an extraordinary shift in general attitudes toward war and conquest?

On a structural level, T.'s view of elite negotiation driving Roman expansion across Italy, rather than military conquest and the hope for spoils and revenue, poses another challenge: as D. clearly demonstrates by collating all the available evidence, textual and archaeological, for building projects in the city of Rome, the constant influx of spoils of war would have generated the revenue from which entire sectors like public and religious construction were driven. The sequence of firmly attested manubial buildings starts at the very latest in the late 4th c. BCE, if we discount earlier examples (which, by the way, we should not). This is not purely to be seen as deficit spending by the elites, but it was also, in fact, a massive process of redistribution of wealth: a lot of ordinary people would have profited from successful warfare, both in the city and while on campaign. This is one possible explanation for the extraordinary social cohesion and resilience during periods of crisis and strain, such as in the Samnite Wars or the First Punic War, and also with regard to the way in which Rome could again and again mobilize her allies.

The books in their modern context: why Roman Republican archaeology matters

Overall, both D. and T. make a convincing case for studying the Roman Republic through the lens of material culture. Although they have different aims, methods, and overall focus, they clearly demonstrate the importance of archaeological analysis for this crucial field of Roman history. Ultimately, however, their respective takes on the subject should also be seen within the contemporary context, not only of Classical Studies but of academic and non-academic trends more widely. As T. perceptively states with respect to the Roman conquest of Italy, “each successive generation has produced an account of it that best suited the prevailing ideological needs of its time” (249). The same is, of course, true for his and D.'s books. Thus, in what respect do their interpretations of Roman expansion, politics, and architecture reflect “the prevailing ideological needs” of our time?

As mentioned before, D.'s work can be understood as a synthesis and culmination of decades of previous scholarship on Roman Republican architecture. She sees public building as a political activity, pursued by members of competing elite families, albeit within a strong institutional framework. In her account, the choice of building types, materials, and design therefore reflects both the ambitions of individual commissioners and the norms and expectations of their times. All of this is linked to the traditionally acknowledged historical stages of Roman expansion, first into Italy and then into the wider Mediterranean. In her book, a phase of community building in the Early Republic is thus duly followed by increasing individualism in the 4th and 3rd c. BCE, heightened architectural ostentation in the greater part of the 2nd c. BCE, and crisis and the emergence of a few “strong men” in the 1st c. BCE. Those affected by Roman conquest, both in Italy and elsewhere, do not feature in this picture; ambitious architectural developments in Latium and Campania (e.g., the sanctuary of Fortuna at Praeneste) are barely discussed. For D., the case of public architecture in the city of Rome therefore serves as an illustration of how an inexorably expanding power was able to consolidate its social order by constantly transforming its physical environment through the spoils of empire – until the process reached a tipping point and, through extreme wealth disparities and the ambitions of leading political figures, ended in cataclysmic collapse. This storyline is indeed timeless. First presented by Late Republican authors like Sallust, the tale of stellar rise and brutal demise will always guarantee the Roman Republic an exceptional status in historiography.

By contrast, T.'s account stands for a postcolonial approach which criticizes and deconstructs “old master narratives” of Roman conquest which were written from the perspective of modern colonizers, oppressors, and nationalists. In doing so, he uses material culture as a corpus of counterevidence which serves the purpose of undermining the information conveyed by the literary sources. But this critical stance also reflects major fault lines in modern sociopolitical thinking. On the one hand, T. presents his vision of Republican Rome and Italy as a counter-image to traditional scholarship, branding it as a subversive and revisionist rereading of Roman imperialism; he is avowedly suspicious of intellectual hegemony and deliberately does not comply with certain codes of academic practice, e.g., by omitting references to almost all ancient authors but Livy. On the other hand, T. prefers to write the history of individuals and families instead of institutions or states. However, his protagonists are not, strictly speaking, the “oppressed” whom it would be worthwhile rescuing from the obscurity of history, but rather Roman and non-Roman elites who are displayed as engaged in constant “games” and “plays” of negotiating and brokering power. In this view, individual bargaining in a marketplace of sociopolitical power replaces the more traditionalist concept of Roman political, military, and social institutions upon which D.'s book is founded. It might not be a coincidence that such a narrative of sly, scheming elites appears at a time of rising suspicions against state institutions in Europe and the US, alongside the popular image of modern politicians as unscrupulous “power brokers” who have lost touch with their electorate. I wonder whether it could not also be understood as a reflection of the erosion of confidence in political institutions and their representatives in modern, Western-style democracies over the last 30 years.

Both books therefore clearly chime with modern audiences. What they do not present, however, is a truly social history of Republican Rome and Italy during the crucial stages of expansion, aggression, and integration. Exploring such social perspectives on Roman and Italic communities and their architecture and material culture in the Republican period remains a challenging and rewarding task for future studies that hopefully will go beyond the rather narrow focus on the elites and return agency to the countless people who did the fighting, building, and farming. Surely, they were all in this together.