It is generally accepted that the peoples of ancient Italy had a deep appreciation and respect for ‘the past’. The past permeates our extant literary sources from the peninsula and has always shaped and structured our modern understanding of Roman society, culture and history. Indeed, while often viewed through an explicitly ‘Roman’ lens, from the time when ancient Italians first set pen to parchment, understanding their place in time and their relationship with the past seems to have been vital. In this book, Bernard attempts to push our understanding of the ancient Italian relationship with the past a bit further, and beyond the confines of our extant, Romano-centric literature. Bringing together a rich collection of archaeological and epigraphic data from across the Italian peninsula for the period from 900 to 300 b.c.e., B. provocatively challenges traditional conceptions of ‘history’ and offers some intriguing possibilities for a new and more inclusive way forward.

In pushing the discussion beyond the confines of the literature, B. is first forced to grapple with the strictures of the traditional genre of ‘history’ — a wrestling match that forms the core of the book’s Introduction. Conventionally, ‘history’, in the Western world, has been understood to be the descendant of the Greek ἱστορία, or the systematic, rational and typically written inquiry into the past to explain the present. This version of ‘history’ is usually narrative and organised in a chronologically linear fashion. It is also a deeply humanist endeavour, emerging from fifth-century b.c.e. Greek philosophical movements, then shaped by the intellectual currents of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds, and later those of the Renaissance, Enlightenment and modernity. While this approach to the past has its uses, singular adherence to it has also, rightly, drawn criticism over the past 40-plus years, often as part of the dialogue around postcolonialism. Certainly, traditional ‘history’ offers one way to engage with the past, although it is not the only way, and its dominance in scholarship (and the division of societies into ‘pre-historic’ and ‘historic’ based on how closely they adhere to its norms) not only limits understanding but risks perpetuating colonial injustices. In this book, B. adopts the more open and flexible paradigm of ‘historical culture’ to encapsulate ‘those various modes of cultural production that facilitated a society’s engagement with its past’ (25). In doing so, he attempts to create space for alternative conceptions of and approaches to the past, beyond the traditional, linear historical model. In this, he is largely successful. In fact, the ‘freedom’ is, at times, unsettling. One wonders whether the judicious application of other, well-attested, non-historical approaches to the past might have helped to ground the discussion (e.g. from a New Zealand perspective, the parallels between B.’s ‘ancestral’ time and whakapapa, which is a genealogical structuring, literally ‘to place in layers’, are noteworthy). Additionally, despite the explicit rejection of the traditional linear approach, it is noteworthy that a chronological undercurrent still runs through the work. Although it is not the express goal of the book, some interesting arguments around the socio-political development of Italian society emerge during the discussion. These, conveniently, often align with more traditional historiographical arguments, providing a useful point of connection with those narratives. Although they also, perhaps, raise the worrying spectre of the lingering influence of historiographical tendencies.

This undercurrent aside, B. appropriately adopts a thematic structure for the bulk of the book. Ch. 2 discusses ‘Ancestors’, exploring how burials can be connected with family, genealogies and time. Here, and elsewhere, the evidence naturally skews towards the elite. While this is arguably unavoidable, and the interpretations offered remain largely convincing, it is clear that even this more expansive and flexible approach still provides insight into only a narrow sliver of ancient Italian society. Chs 3 and 4 move the discussion to urban centres, and their spatial construction and founders respectively. Ch. 5 considers ‘Time’ more broadly in an early Italian context. B. increasingly brings in written evidence here, both literary and epigraphic, to argue for two different approaches to time, ‘ancestral’ or ‘generational’ time and ‘calendrical’ time, and for the importance of ritual in their construction. Ch. 6 looks at ‘Images’, and how artistic depictions, especially tomb paintings, may have featured in remembering and refiguring the past. The book concludes with a succinct but effective conclusion, summarising the core points. Throughout, B. does a masterful job of combining famous examples with lesser-known pieces of evidence to build a broadly convincing picture of the potential role of ‘the past’ in the social and cultural fabric of ancient Italy. The work is most successful in highlighting the many places where engagement with the past would have been possible, and perhaps even probable, although it is difficult to say whether this engagement happened with certainty.

In sum, in this book B. effectively demonstrates what a ‘historical culture’ in ancient Italy might have looked like. Woven through every facet of life, the past was easily and readily accessible for ancient Italians. It is clear that they were not confined to the narrow approach to the past propagated by ancient historians. Theirs was a much richer and more dynamic entanglement. But perhaps more importantly, B. is entirely convincing in his argument for consciously embracing the multiplicity of ways in which different peoples, both past and present, might engage with the past and the potential that this might hold for ancient world studies. This is an argument and position I can only loudly second, and wish others would also take up.