This was an important book when published in 1990. It remains a modern classic, and no comparable book exists to my knowledge. The book consists of five parts (1: ‘Rome: A City Prepared’; 2: ‘Rome at War’; 3: ‘In the Camp’; 4: ‘Rome in Victory’; 5: ‘War and Religion in Rome’) and eighteen chapters, focusing on Rome until the Augustan period. The broad range of issues discussed is staggering. The introduction emphasises war as a social construct (p. 9). Mary Beard, I assume, might emphasise it as a cultural contract (The Roman Triumph [2007]), whereas I have personally put emphasis on it as a political construct (Triumph in the Age of Civil War [2016]). A section on the ‘state of the art’ duly recognises the substantial amount of scholarship that has been produced on the subjects pertaining to this book over the last 30 years, but ‘[t]o integrate this material on the thematic scale of this study has proved an impossible task’ (p. 13). A ‘few references to major new positions or treatments’ have been added (p. 13), whilst scholarship before 1989 has (strangely?) been removed from the footnotes. The argument basically remains that of the original German edition (p. 13). The subject of the book is the place of war in Roman culture with a focus on its religious dimensions, right at the crossroads between ancient history and religious studies. The book provides a survey of rituals and religious institutions related to war and peace. At least to this reviewer an even stronger focus on changes over time would have made it possible to place war within the changing world of Roman warfare of the second and first centuries bce: from foreign to internal war and later stasis and civil war. But then again, the impact of civil war trend is relatively new.

What are we to make of this edition? The new version has sadly missed the chance to be more significant. There is no denying that a translation is helpful in principle, but a revised text would have been preferable for this to make an impact. The omission of updated references makes the book strangely out of date. Adding to this, if this was meant for students, it seems odd not to include translations of ancient quotations. A substantial afterword by Federico Santangelo laments that in-depth engagements with R.'s interpretations are rather infrequent and its main contentions have not ‘been fully brought to fruition in later scholarship’ (p. 281). Perhaps because I am one of those scholars who only tangentially discuss his arguments (as pointed out on page 296 n. 71), I confess that I find this afterword rather unhelpful. It is safe to say that R. has very little to say about triumph and civil war (esp. Chapter 14; triumph and civil war, see page 234). Where does this leave us? I am not sure I understand why a translation is needed without a proper update of the book. Having said that, the fact remains that for everybody interested in the interaction between war and religion, this is the book to read.