R. writes with verve and force, and he casts a discerning eye on a murky tradition. He begins from questions. Why did Marcus Brutus (the praetor of 44) feel pressure to emulate Lucius Brutus (the consul of 509)? Why did the son of Decius Mus decide to sacrifice his life in an act of deuotio just as his father had? R. argues that the Romans conceived of character traits as belonging to families, thereby creating the expectation that current members of a family would act as their ancestors had, or even that one's ancestors would have acted as contemporary family members did. Thus when Rome's early historians came to fill out the thin account of Rome's early years, they found it plausible to extend the qualities of each family's most defining figure(s) either backward or forward in time to other members of the gens. The Claudii are regularly characterised as arrogantly patrician, for example, and R. proposes that the historical tradition gradually saturated all the Claudii with the haughtiness of their defining members. Hence these Claudian characteristics should not be directly attributed to the authorial shaping of any specific author (e.g. Livy), but rather understood as but the clearest demonstration of a conception of family character that imbues the formulation of the entire historical tradition about early Rome.

These arguments, supported by examples involving a number of families, comprise the first of the book's three lengthy chapters. The second chapter then studies, as a test case, the representation of the gens Fabia in light of its most famous member, Q. Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, the ‘Delayer’ against Hannibal. R. first models the distinctive attributes of the achievements of Verrucosus, and then documents the conspicuous reoccurrence of elements of this model in all the major Fabian stories of early Rome, in particular those of the three Fabii who held consulships from 485–479, the Fabii at Cremera at 479 and the career of Q. Fabius Maximus Rullianus (the censor of 304). R.'s thoroughness uncovers a steady stream of suspiciously similar characterising elements, and their cumulative patterning documents a compelling hypothesis for understanding one strand of the development of the literary history of earliest Rome.

The third chapter also explores patterns of invention drawn from a prominent known model, but the focus changes from family characteristics to much broader circumstantial characteristics: one people would react to the sack of their city much like an earlier people had reacted to the sack of their city, especially if that earlier sack were prominent and well documented to the imagination of later historians. In this way, R. argues, the literary tradition describing the sack of Rome by the Gauls in 390 was modelled on the tradition of the sack of Athens by the Persians in 480 (and extended to the 300 Fabii at Cremera as a second Thermopylae). This chapter is more speculative than the first two, and the results are less convincing. R. is successful overall in showing that significant parallel patterns exist (see p. 151 for the complete chart), but some of his parallels are slight or even forced (note, for example, how he simply discounts Plutarch's inconvenient reference to eighteen cities of Etruria and later claims that Plutarch said that there were twelve: pp. 117, 149).

R. anticipates the reaction that not all his arguments are equally strong. In an explicitly methodological statement early in the book, he explains that his approach ‘has deliberately tended very much toward the inclusive’ (p. 12) and acknowledges that some of the facets of textual repetition that he presents will seem less persuasive to his readers. The final judgement of what constitutes a persuasive parallel, therefore, ‘has been left up to the reader to decide’ (p. 14). Leaving such a vital decision up to the reader seems a missed opportunity. Given his control of the sources that comprise the tradition, R. seems well equipped to propose criteria for evaluating degrees of inventedness within patterns of imitation and repetition. As it is, R.'s pose is to accept the validity of all the parallels he adduces, and his strain towards inclusiveness dilutes his argument's effectiveness.

There are other ways in which the book's manner of argument interferes with the value of the argument itself. R. is too zealous in his assertions that his thesis is the only way the patterns he identifies can be understood. If, for example, earlier Fabii ‘were said to have behaved as Verrucosus did, that can only be because the tradition concerning them has been recast, or simply created, sometime after Verrucosus’ career and in the light of it' (p. 58). The parallels between the sack of Athens and the sack of Rome, for R., ‘cannot be dismissed as mere coincidences, nor are they necessarily the inevitable result of the similar nature of the two events. They must rather have been devised intentionally’ (p. 130). These assertions of inevitability and intentionality presume a mechanisation of what was depicted in Chapter 1 as an organic process of invention. Similarly, given that R. takes a very sceptical view about the historicity of the tradition, he finds that the consequence of mapping these family patterns is that it becomes ‘extremely difficult, if not even impossible, to have any confidence in the historicity of the presentation of the various figures from Rome's early and indeed even later history’ (p. 113). I am not a sceptic to the same degree that R. is, and thus I find that such a declaration claims too much. The value of his argument derives from his success in further hollowing out the tradition's historicity, for he documents how patterns of invented material appear to be systematically embedded across the whole tradition from the earliest Republic to the Second Punic War. But it seems premature to conclude that the tools for scepticism that he develops are enough in themselves to cause the historicity of the entire narrative of early Roman history to collapse.

R.'s choice of the gens Fabia as the centrepiece of his analysis creates unresolved friction with his emphasis that the repetition of familial characteristics is to be attributed to the Roman mindset generally and not to particular historians. Given that Cicero complains that aristocratic families were prone to embellish their own histories (p. 51), and given that the first foundations of Rome's historical tradition were set by a member of the Fabii, then one seems justified in asking whether the application of the characteristics of Fabius Verrucosus to the entire Fabian line originated with Fabius Pictor, who was a contemporary of Verrucosus. R. posits that ‘it is not necessary to hold Pictor responsible’ (p. 81; see also pp. 152, 159–61), but his decision not to attempt to measure Pictor's responsibility is also a missed opportunity. He may well be right, but he would have had a better argument if he had engaged with the question more directly. To investigate the tradition of the Fabii without equally rigorous investigation of the possible influence of Pictor upon it is another example of overconfidence in the conclusiveness of his approach.

With these caveats, R. deserves considerable credit for identifying and articulating the patterned imitations that become seemingly inherent to the depiction of family members in early Roman historical narratives, as well as the possible extent to which the model of the sack of Athens influenced the depiction of the sack of Rome. His method yields results, and the consequences of those results deserve further exploration. Anyone interested in early Roman history or historiography will want to engage with this book.