D.'s book is the first full-length study in English of the Social War (as his subtitle indicates, D. prefers the term ‘insurgency’). His main purpose ‘is to reconstruct a history of the Social War in Italy’ (p. 1), but he also devotes a chapter each to the history of scholarship on the war (Chapter 1) and an in-depth study of the relevant ancient sources and their associated problems (Chapter 2). D.'s account of the war itself (contained for the most part in Chapters 6 and 7) is supplemented by useful stage- and context-setting chapters (3 to 5) and chapters (8 and 9) describing the Roman wartime citizenship legislation designed to quell the revolt, and the political and military legacy of the insurgency down to 70 b.c.
D.'s first chapter establishes the major differences in scholarly interpretation of the Italian insurgents’ motivations: some have argued that they wanted complete freedom (libertas) and independence from Roman rule, others that they wanted full Roman citizenship, and still others that their motives changed over the course of the insurgency. Each of these views, as Chapter 2 shows, has its basis in the ancient sources, but the latter are mostly retrospective, and almost unanimously attribute to the insurgents a desire for Roman citizenship. This does not necessarily conflict with the notion that the Italians wanted libertas, D. argues, as long as freedom is understood not as secession from Roman control, but equality under Roman law. This libertas had been gradually infringed upon since the early second century b.c., D. argues in Chapter 3. By the time of his tribunate in 91 b.c., D. argues in Chapter 4, the normally conservative M. Livius Drusus the Younger proposed radical legislation offering Italian enfranchisement as an improvised and last-minute attempt to appease potential opposition to his agrarian legislation. When this failed, the insurgency began.
In his main narrative chapters on the war, D. shows that the insurgents’ initial strategy of compelling other Italians to join their cause was successful at first, as indeed were many of their military operations against the Romans. But the passage of the lex Iulia in late 90 b.c., granting citizenship to those peoples who remained loyal to Rome, deprived the rebels of potential allies in Etruria and Umbria. Thereafter, things began to unravel for the insurgency. Despite the death in battle of the consul L. Porcius Cato in early 89 at their hands, the Marsi went on to suffer heavy defeats, and Picentine Asculum fell to Cato's colleague Cn. Pompeius Strabo by mid-November. The insurgency continued to collapse under the weight of Roman military victories and legislative initiatives granting Roman citizenship to ever greater numbers of Italians.
As mentioned before, a monograph on the Social War is welcome and indeed long overdue. D. sifts and weighs the evidence carefully, and his judgements are for the most part sound. The one exception to this involves the insurgents’ motivations. On the one hand, D. frequently insists on a diversity of motives among the diverse elements of the insurgency: ‘the aspirations of the insurgents were [not] singular in purpose [or] nature’ (p. 213). And yet he also strenuously denies secessionist tendencies to any of the insurgent groups at any point during the war: ‘a war fought for outright independence from Rome is unreasonable’ (p. 41). He prefers instead to attribute to all the insurgents, regardless of their ethnicity, a desire for full Roman citizenship, even though he correctly sees this as a fundamentally ahistorical by-product of our uniformly retrospective ancient source material that inferred the cause of the war from its known result. This sometimes leads to special pleading. Thus, although I agree with D.'s argument in Chapter 5 that the evidence of the insurgents’ Italia coinage cannot prove on its own ‘an elaborate mirror Roman state’ being established by the rebels by 90 b.c. (p. 115), it is a leap too far for him to claim that this disproves that the Italians were completely indifferent to establishing an independent state.
Another example: when the insurgents went to Rome in winter 91/90 b.c. to demand citizenship, they were rebuffed by the senators, who told them they needed to change course before they could send ambassadors to Rome (App. BC 1.39). The insurgents decided to fight, not, it seems, for what had now been explicitly denied them – citizenship – but for independence from Rome. This better explains the desperate savagery and violence with which they subsequently fought than, as D. believes, the desire for legal equality – a status that the senators had led them to believe they had no intention of extending to them, even if they laid down their arms. The ‘nationalist’ iconography on the insurgency's coins, some of it quite violent (for example, the Italian bull goring the Italian wolf, reproduced on p. 131), seems to envisage two antagonistic states within Italy fighting to the death. This same coin, incidentally, depicts Bacchus, Pater Liber, on the obverse which, when linked to the zero-sum imagery on the reverse, indicates that the libertas the insurgents were fighting for was more likely freedom in the sense of independence, secured through bloody revolution, than legal equality under Roman law.
The most serious criticism that can be levelled at the book, however, is its technical presentation. There are scores of errors scattered throughout, ranging from misplaced or missing apostrophes and punctuation errors to errors of syntax and misspellings. On pp. 46–7 alone I count at least seven mistakes: ‘publically’ instead of ‘publicly,’ ‘as such’ used incorrectly to mean ‘therefore’ (a common quirk of D.'s), negotiaores instead of negotiatores, ‘duel’ rather than ‘dual’, the omission of the word ‘they’ in one sentence and the misspelling of feriae two different ways in two different places as ferriae (n. 12) and ferae (n. 13). The mistakes in Latin orthography are indeed particularly egregious (Greek too; cf. the 21 diacritical and spelling errors in less than two lines quoted from App. BC 1.39 on p. 106). Thus negotiatores is variously spelled negotiores (p. 16) and the aforementioned negotiaores (p. 46), provinciae appears as provincae (p. 120), externarum as exterarum (p. 121 n. 103), annales as anales (p. 144 [twice]), singillatim as sigillatim (p. 181 [twice]) and iudiciariam (Liv. Per. 71) as the very scribal-looking corruption, iudiciariariam (p. 74 n. 32). D.'s word-processor's auto-correct function is mostly to blame for many Latin errors, having rendered regionibus as regions (p. 41 n. 63), promulgatis, promulgates (p. 56), multitudo and futurae, multitude and future (p. 64), orationes, orations (pp. 86 n. 81 and 106 n. 40), defectiones, defections (pp. 105 n. 38 and 119 n. 88) and senes, sense (p. 157 n. 36). Sometimes D. uses a consonantal v in Latin words, sometimes a u.
My purpose is not to embarrass D. or to belittle the very important contribution he has made to our knowledge of an important episode in the history of the Late Republic. My point, rather, is to warn young scholars against rushing their work into print before seeing to it that it is carefully edited. Lamentably, as the present case shows, it is a fact of modern life that some publishing houses are simply unwilling to put the time, the effort and, most crucially, the money into properly editing scholarly manuscripts, and so it must increasingly fall to the scholarly writer herself to do so. Ashgate has done a great disservice to D. by not subjecting his manuscript to the careful scrutiny and copy-editing it deserved as an important piece of scholarship, and should be ashamed of its slipshod editorial practices.
