Imagine a baby boy being rocked by his grandfather somewhere in Italy in 245 BCE. The scene serves as a bridge in Italian history. If the grandfather had been 20 years old at the Battle of Sentinum, he would be 70 as he cuddled the child. The boy, if he survived the trials of infancy in the premodern world, would be 30 when communities throughout Italy deliberated over their allegiances in the year after Cannae. The father who linked them presumably fought in the First Punic War and the baby's own future son might fight at Magnesia against Antiochus III. The arithmetic of their ages is simple.

The great variable lies not in the chronology but in the location. If the family was in Rome, then all four generations would have fought as legionaries in these epic wars. If the family was in a place like Praeneste, then all four generations would have fought besides the Romans as Latin allies. If, on the other hand, we are envisioning Etruscans, then the father likely fought against Rome, while the three succeeding generations fought alongside the Romans as socii.

The portrait can become yet more complicated. If this family belonged to the Hirpini, then the baby's grandfather probably fought against the Romans, but his father and son alongside the Romans, while he himself fought as an ally of Rome, before then defecting to Hannibal after his victory at Cannae in 216. At Capua, we cannot even know the status of the grandfather, since he would be a full Roman citizen if he was descended from a select group of cavalrymen, but only a “citizen without the vote” if he was an infantryman.

The list could go on. All of this serves as a reminder that there was no single story of Rome's relationship with Italy. Moreover, as Fronda has shown, much of the variety in allegiance arises from local factors rather than from attitudes toward Rome.Footnote ¹ The Italians had their own worldviews – and many of them.

Any attempt to essentialize relations between Rome and Italy would thus be folly. And the hypothetical scene above serves as a reminder that, when various communities joined Hannibal after 216, the wounds were still quite fresh. Not all that much time passed between eruptions. Moreover, those events affected Italians’ relations not just with Rome, but with each other. Many Etruscans fought alongside Samnites during the Sentinum campaign against the Romans, then fought alongside each other and the Romans in the First Punic War. Then some Samnites fought against Etruscans and Romans in the Second Punic War, after which they all served together in the 2nd c. There was simply too broad a range of experiences to squeeze into a single characterization. When the Marsi declared that there was “no triumph over the Marsi, no triumph without the Marsi,” they were explicitly, self-consciously not speaking for other Italian peoples. In fact, if the Marsi were claiming that the Romans never celebrated a triumph over them, then they were not even speaking accurately for themselves: M. Valerius Corvinus triumphed over them in 302.Footnote ² In Italy, there was plenty of conflict, but different periods saw it channeled in different ways, as if dykes were burst and rebuilt, diverting war to and from different regions.

That everchanging set of relations makes the approach of this volume – the result of a 2015 conference in Cologne – readily comprehensible. Roth explains in his introduction that there are four different ways to see Italy's many communities: it is possible to conceive of them together as partners in the center of a Mediterranean empire; or one can view Rome as the dominant hegemon within Italy; or one can see Rome's remarkably narrow and unobtrusive rule in Italy – a rule concerned with little beyond the supply of military manpower – as teetering on the edge of anarchy; or, perhaps most productively, Italy can be viewed as a post-conflict community, in which all relations mediated (and were mediated by) the legacy of recent wars. R. suggests that these various descriptions “might initially come across as mutually exclusive” (14–15), but in reality they describe the ways in which the animosities and allegiances discussed above lived on in Italy's relationship with Rome.

There is nothing mutually exclusive about the descriptions, as the 10 papers assembled by R., H., and K. ably demonstrate. There are many correct and even symbiotic ways to view Roman Italy in the period from the end of the Hannibalic War to the end of the Second Triumvirate. The authors do not adhere to any fixed interpretation or thesis. Instead, they demonstrate what high-quality scholars, when given a prompt, can produce from different perspectives and backgrounds. Yet, for all of the breadth and variety, their contributions can all be tied to a theme of post-conflict communities. Romans and Italians were constantly managing relationships that in so many cases were forged on opposite sides of battlefields and simply could not be whitewashed. They could only be managed.

The book is divided into three sections: “Conceptualising Rome's Italian empire”; “Before Roman Italy: territories and societies, 201–91 BC”; and “Integrating the Italian Romans, 91–31 BC.” In the first section, J. R. Patterson attacks the problem of managing the legacies of conquest within Italy by examining the record of historical commemoration in Rome. Across various media, and across periods, those Romans who conquered Italy in the 4th c. have enjoyed a surprisingly low profile compared to their successors from the overseas wars. P. suggests that the reason for such reticence is the delicate nature of celebrating the defeats of those who are now comrades as citizens or socii. The negotiation of post-conflict relations is clear here: these people shared an army camp now – even a “territorial state,” in Terrenato's terms – and it would not do for one half to laud these victories over the other.Footnote ³

The conclusion is convincing, and has ramifications for Livy and the other annalistic historians. What did it mean for Livy to dedicate most of his first 10 books to the conquest of central Italy, and more in the second decade to the conquest of the rest of Italy? Does P.'s reconstruction make annalistic history (especially in Fabius’ original Greek version) in some sense subversive or transgressive? What was it like for someone who grew up in a city downplaying the conquest of Italy to read a serial retelling of just those undermentioned campaigns? Inevitably, readers will quibble with minor points along the way in every paper, and this one is no exception. For example, P. repeats the view that Pliny ascribed the mounting of prows on the speakers’ platform to the populus Romanus, but, though an entrenched position,Footnote ⁴ this represents a misreading of Pliny (HN 34.20):

The issue here is the subject of fixerat. Many scholars have translated the passage so that the populus Romanus “fixed” the rostra to the platform, but this is difficult to sustain. In this case, fixerat sits within a relative clause opened with quibus, but has no sense that connects it to that relative pronoun. A much more sensible reading would have Maenius “fix” the rostra. In this case, fixerat would exist within the relative clause opened with qui, and would be bound to it in an obvious and grammatical way. Moreover, eodemque in consulatu makes much more sense if it is modifying the actions of the consul. Most telling of all, however, is the pattern of tenses. If Maenius’ qui is the subject, then he both conquered the Latini and fixed the rostra in the pluperfect, while the booty was distributed in the imperfect: “used to offer.” According to this more natural reading, Maenius conquered the Prisci Latini, to whom the Roman people used to give one third of the booty, and Maenius alone then fixed the rostra to the platform in the same consulship as his earlier victory.Footnote ⁵

The other paper of the first section was no doubt difficult to assimilate into the volume, and readers ought to beware. Most of the book has a clear chronological structure: P. deals with the earliest period, and the final two sections are grouped in two categories of 201–91 and 91–31. C. Ando's paper sweeps these periods aside and, though beginning in the Middle Republic, lands us firmly in the Imperial period. There are rewards to this, however. A. uses the formulations of Republican law to grasp how the Romans conceived of and defined the many Italian communities to which they were bound. In an illuminating discussion, he explores how the metropole's challenge of creating a manageable set of categories ran up against the extraordinary diversity of peripheral communities. Far from being a problem, however, the consequent abstraction prevented the Romans from becoming overly prescriptive and actually provided the Italians with the governmental space and autonomy that kept them contented. The sheer variety of communities rendered specific regulation impossible. Over time, and as the Romans began to manage more overseas conquests, the methods of abstraction became more territorial – thus the lex Rupilia in Sicily or the settlement of Macedonia. A. also demonstrates that the perspective of this legislation was firmly from the city of Rome. It employed deictic terms such as “here” and “there,” with an assumed viewer in the center.Footnote ⁶ The result is an insight into how legislative practices defined the relationship between the Roman center and the many people who lived under their soft rule.

The second section, on Italy between the Hannibalic and Social Wars, opens with Roth's paper on elite interests. R. sets the scene with a discussion of the censors of 174 and their divergent approach to construction projects. A. Postumius Albinus refused to issue contracts for any project that was not explicitly ordered by the senate or populus, while Q. Fulvius Flaccus initiated construction of projects in various Italian towns on his own. R. is surely right that this testifies to the escalating anxiety about censors’ advertising their names on so many buildings in this period,Footnote ⁷ but he misses the most interesting fiscal point: Flaccus appears to have used the Italians’ own money (ipsorum pecunia) for these projects.Footnote ⁸ Pisaurum, Fundi, Potentia, and Sinuessa were asking Rome's censor to contract for their building projects with their own money. Aside from issues of political patronage, it was perhaps easier to find the best builders at the best price in the quinquennial censorial auctions, and so they asked Fulvius to auction off the contracts. Yet R. goes on to explore fruitfully the many ways in which Italy drew the attention of Roman citizens. There was an explosion of colonies in the first half of the 2nd c. – especially in Cisalpine GaulFootnote ⁹ – while economic investments are apparent in a variety of ways.

R. raises interesting questions. Though a single paper on such a large topic inevitably slides toward generalization – a lengthier study would acknowledge much more thematic and regional variety (see Roselaar's contribution to the volume), especially in the northFootnote ¹⁰ – there is a salutary reminder there that the story of the Italian peripheries is not just one of allies in some strict dichotomy against Romans, but involves plenty of citizen interests and plenty of entangled institutionalization as well.

M. Bolder-Boos builds on the theme of investment and construction by surveying urban renovation in the 2nd c. Joining a choir of recent work,Footnote ¹¹ she shows that Italian towns and colonies were not “mini-Romes,” but encompassed a wide variety that reflected and preserved local traditions and economic resources. Perhaps the most generalizable Italian features were the role of conquest in generating wealth and the innovation of opus caementicum in revolutionizing architecture.

S. Bourdin offers the speculative but worthwhile thesis that ethnic leagues persisted, not as independent instruments of war, but as recruiting mechanisms for the Romans through the formula togatorum. If this is correct, it entails several points. B. argues that the leagues would have functioned as critical networks in mobilizing for the Social War, and this would indeed be interesting. It would also follow that the league became a way of aggregating the contributions of small polities that were not worth enlisting individually, and of spreading casualties through a region, rather than risking the youth of just one town or city in any given year. That is, if young men were drawn from across the Marsi as a collective, then any battlefield disaster would be spread across the many villages of the region, instead of being concentrated in whichever locale supplied troops to that campaign. The existence of a larger institution like B.'s Ligue also offered prestigious leadership positions to ambitious Italians who were locked out of Rome's cursus honorum.

In the final paper of the section, S. T. Roselaar examines the issue of land. Her conclusion is that Rome's unobtrusive hegemony provided insufficient certainty about property holding, and that this led first to a war for citizenship among worried Italians and then to a more institutionalized empire that fixed relations in a way that protected wealthy estates. The price of such a panoramic sketch is that its premises must be hurried through, undefended. R. assumes that the “high count” of the population is correct, that colonization stopped in the 170s, that Roman treatment of Italians really did become more arbitrary and more capricious, that Italians fought for citizenship rather than independence, that citizenship would have increased competition with Roman publicani for contracts, that construction projects slowed dramatically through the 2nd c., that Roman law was not in any way imposed on Italians, that citizens could escape military service if they wished, that Italians would vote in the city, that Italians would be interested in urban grain distributions, that provocatio was a meaningful legal protection worth coveting, and more. R. sometimes confronts these controversies, sometimes acknowledges them in footnotes, but there is simply no way to defend them all in one chapter. They are all defensible, but they are also all – to varying degrees – debated. The central contention, however, must be correct. Rome's settlement of Italy had barely begun to erect the kinds of institutional defenses of property that would be required to hold off the legislative offensives of the Gracchi and others. A new way of balancing interests had to be found.

The abiding portrait that emerges from the first two sections is one of disequilibrium between Rome's de facto power as the victor of serial wars and the institutionalization of that supremacy. I have referred elsewhere to Rome's “thin state.”Footnote ¹² Here, in Italian relations, is another manifestation of this constricted approach to state creation. Rome had no interest in an overly intrusive approach to its useful, familiar, and potentially aggrieved “allies.” In its legal, economic, and bureaucratic arrangements, it left Italy to carry on more or less as it always had, with the exception that Rome would be in control of war and foreign relations. Yet this restraint was built on weak foundations. It was sustainable only so long as Roman leaders resisted the temptation to use their very real dominance to rearrange Italy in disruptive ways. The entwining of Roman and Italians affairs without stabilizing institutions took Italy from a post-conflict condition in 200 BCE to a pre-conflict (or re-conflict?) one in 100.

Section Three focuses on the six decades after the Social War and, given that the only significant realm of institutionalized relations in Italy before this point had surrounded the army, it is fitting that attention turns to matters of war. G. Bradley opens with a sure-footed survey of the many complexities surrounding the Social War. He notes – pushing back against the thesis of strong leagues presented by Bourdin above – the many splits that occurred on a pan-regional (i.e., Italian), regional (e.g., Samnite or Umbrian), or even intra-regional (i.e., between or within local cities or the like) basis. There is, moreover, so much that we do not know; we do not even know whether the Romans fought this war as a war of choice. B.'s conclusion is that “we need a multiplicity of different approaches to the Social War and a fuller understanding of the local contexts in which it took place” (187). Each community has its own history of the Social War, even if the details are all but irretrievable.

W. Blösel then turns to the way in which the new citizens of Italy were incorporated into Roman politics. His argument is that urban politics – elections, rituals, contiones – were in no way able to integrate so many people from such far-flung realms of the peninsula. Only the legions could meld the newly enlarged citizenry; the underrepresentation of Italians in civic life was balanced by their strong representation in the army, and it was there that they became politically available to enterprising generals. That army, moreover, was transformed by Marius's abolition of the old manipular triplex acies and the recruiting of the capite censi.Footnote ¹³ B. argues that the sensibility of citizenship (Bürgerbewusstsein) that emerged after the lex Julia was distinct from the old civic identity of the city, because it was forged not domi but militiae. This process would have ramifications for the many approaches to Roman politics that rely on urban communication, but Bradley's warning that local context must forever be borne in mind ought to apply here as well. Every group had its own background, and B. rightly notes that among the most consequential of all legions were those that Caesar raised in Cisalpine Gaul, which brought very different experiences and legacies into the camp.

S. Karataş and F. Santangelo then turn to Italian elites. The former weighs the options that confronted ambitious notables from municipia after the enfranchisement of Italians. Along with Syme she notes that many evidently preferred to be big fish in the small ponds of their local communities, and this must have been especially true given the hurdles that confronted those that aspired to electoral success in Rome.Footnote ¹⁴ K. focuses on this prejudice against domi nobiles. This position is presumably correct, but it is not as simple a case as might at first seem obvious. Cicero makes various comments about prejudice against those of regional origins, but those comments tend to be convenient for his rhetorical purposes; nor can we dismiss the possibility that the new man from Arpinum was overly sensitive, or even paranoid. Moreover, it is difficult to interpret the impact of various structural features of Roman politics that K. discusses. Secret ballot might have been expected to benefit those with fewer Roman clients to mobilize and compel, yet the data show that the consulship was at least as closed after the leges tabellariae as before.Footnote ¹⁵ Furthermore, over the last two decades, scholars have increasingly argued that voters supported nobiles not through coercion but through the deeply felt, thrall-like charisma of the great houses.Footnote ¹⁶

Similarly, it makes intuitive sense that – as Cicero claims at Planc. 21, a passage that serves an obvious rhetorical purpose for his case – home support for a consular candidate was important, but the distribution of votes through tribes constrained any one community's ability to affect the overall election. In the comitia tributa, every one of Plancius’ neighbors from Atina could have turned out to vote, but that only helped them to run up the vote in their tribus Teretina; in the first class of the comitia centuriata, they could only win the century assigned to the Teretina's iuniores and the century assigned to its seniores. Bringing them all to the election was akin to a Democratic presidential candidate turning out more votes in Massachusetts.

It was in part because of the distribution of votes that Comment. pet. 30 insists that a consular candidate must memorize all of Italy tribe by tribe. And as K. notes, there was no substitute for being visible in Rome itself – that had been true for two and a half centuries by Cicero's time, as the case of Vitruvius Vaccus shows (Livy 8.19). No doubt K. is correct that Plancius’ network of publicani was of the utmost importance – more than his support at home in Atina – since mobilizing the rich was more valuable than mobilizing any one location. It also brought him Rome's finest advocate.

Santangelo marshals evidence of a thriving world of regional and pan-regional – to use Bradley's terms – politics that brought various Italians to prominence. There were different vectors. Some held office in numerous municipia, others exercised patronage over entire regions, while, for a select few, the position of praefectus fabrum offered a route to influence in Rome independent of electoral politics. S. also traces hints of the influence that was wielded in Italy's peripheries: for example, Cicero (Att. 9.15.3) monitored the views of the municipales homines ac rustici during the Civil War because their preference for Caesar really mattered.

The cumulative effect of Section Three is an argument that, far from Italians being pulled into Rome's politics after the Social War, Italy stretched the definition of politics to include networks across the entire peninsula and in army camps around the Mediterranean world. There are, of course, problems of evidence here. If we had the letters of, say, P. Rutilius Rufus, then we might see a lot more continuity than our literary sources currently show; that would be even more true if we had the correspondence of a Poppaedius Silo, or the leaders of Fregellae in 125. As so often, Cicero skews our understanding through the sheer volume of his anomalous testimony. Similarly, the epigraphic evidence collected by Bispham pulls our gaze to Italy after the Social War.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet the overall impression of this section has a lot in its favor. The field spent decades testing the possibilities of patronage as an explanatory mechanism in Late Republican politics, and we have spent some time now employing the “communicative turn” – it is noticeable and regrettable that the one editor who did not contribute a paper here is the one who has added so much to our understanding of urban political semiotics – but the papers collected here further calls for new approaches to politics and Italian integration from beyond the comitia and the contio.

Much of that will likely follow Bradley's geographically informed perspective and his appreciation of regional nuance and archaeology. Material culture is certainly not absent from this volume – public architecture is especially well represented – but readers of this journal will likely ponder the ramifications of settlement patterns and of changes in agriculture, the economy, and the natural environment. That work, moreover, is well underway. Understanding of a place like the Ager Pomptinus has been furthered in recent years by Groningen's project there,Footnote ¹⁸ and it sheds light on the scale of investment in this notoriously marshy area in the 2nd c. BCE. Similarly, Ellis has discussed the transformation of urban economies in this period; for example, the 2nd c. witnessed a reduction in the number of domestic ovens and the emergence of retail bakeries.Footnote ¹⁹ For every 10 people who benefited from improved management of wetlands or who ceased to knead dough every day for their loaf, there must have been at least a few who came to approve of Italian life under Roman hegemony. There are complicated issues here of class interests, of regional diversity – not all places experienced the same fortunes in the 2nd or 1st c. – and of just how people come to form political positions.

At the heart of this book is the recurring transition from hostility to peace. So much depends on the ways in which identities (and the boundaries that delineate them) were formed and dissolved, activated and deactivated.Footnote ²⁰ The boundaries that separated Samnites and Romans at Sentinum could be deactivated in a location like the melting-pot world of Delos, where shared Italian identity and a common memory of having “won” the Greek world defined their relationship with respect to non-Italians. But those boundaries were clearly activated again by the time of the Social War. This volume points the way toward a more nuanced understanding of how actors and events brokered the complicated process of activating and deactivating these identities before, during, and after moments of intense conflict. At first glance, it makes no sense that a man like Poppaedius Silo would shift from demanding inclusion in Rome to leading a war against Rome, from seeing himself as a deserving and desirous member of the polity to declaring himself an avowed enemy. No doubt thousands shared that conversion, while others probably wanted independence without ever wanting Roman citizenship.Footnote ²¹ Various chapters in this book heighten the suspicion that brokers from all over Italy haggled and cajoled to sway groups like the Marsi and leaders like Poppaedius to one course of action or another. These were not like the “sleepwalkers” of 1914; instead, they deliberately curated a complex terrain of allegiances and animosities across the peninsula. That action reflected long histories, inherited memories, future expectations, and complicated networks of association. Steering all of those factors was an ongoing act of politics. It was all part of an Italy that still rewards study, and, though its impact will be hampered by the lack of an index, this collection of essays lays part of the foundation for the way forward.