The essential thesis of V.’s book is that the Romans won the First Punic War only thanks to extensive help from the Sicilians, especially Hiero II's Syracuse and, after 254, Panormus. Inevitably this requires bold arguments and, in places, heroic assumptions.

Part 1, ‘La grande strategia del consenso’, looks at Pyrrhus’ Sicilian foray of 278–276 b.c. and why it failed, before going on to Rome's contrasting successes in winning and keeping widespread Siceliot and Elymian support during the war with Carthage. The much lengthier Part 2, ‘Naves et Sicilienses’, starts with the Romans’ problems, methods and solutions for creating their navy and defeating – most of the time – their more navally experienced foes, then analyses Rome's needs in the Sicilian war-theatre: manpower, equipment, repairs and information-gathering in both land and sea operations. Appendices with extensive selections from the original sources and ten maps of Sicily during the war, a full bibliography and four indexes round out the work.

V. asks important questions: what made most of Sicily fall behind Rome early in the war and remain not just loyal but helpful thereafter; how was her new fleet able to defeat the seasoned Carthaginians so soon; how did warship-building techniques, Carthaginian as well as Roman, evolve; and the overall theme, what did the Sicilians contribute? In V.’s view, a great deal. Indeed, he implies, the Romans could not have won the war without Sicilian, and more particularly Syracusan, know-how (a term he often uses; it is even indexed).

For V., the widespread support was due to Rome's traditions of Trojan or Odyssean founding (pp. 38–9 – Trojan would appeal to the Segestans, Odyssean to the Siceliots) and because they admired her principle of fides and the prowess of Roman armies in Magna Graecia (pp. 41–7). This is rather at odds with his view (pp. 22, 24) that dozens of cities became her allies in 263 because she was fighting Hiero II's Syracuse, a state which they all disliked and feared. It is also at odds with Diodorus’ report (23.4.1) that they acted out of fear, but V. is resolute that Sicilians did not feel paura then or later (pp. 29–30, 33). Enthusiasm, he supposes (pp. 52–5), survived the sackings, lootings and mass enslavements from Adranon in 264 to Agrigentum, Mazarin and Mytistraton in 261–258; the Sicilians were quite comfortable with these – indeed ‘l'esempio di Mytistraton aveva anche lo scopo di ribadire il valore della fides … con le sue regole ferree ma immutabili’.

V. seeks to illuminate matters with concepts from modern international relations theorists, especially Edward Luttwak and Joseph Nye (pp. 35–8): ‘hard power’ (essentially, military force) and ‘soft power’ (psychological appeal), ‘suasion’ (a ‘hard power’ aspect), ‘input’, ‘output’, ‘deficit’, ‘active measures’ and ‘power projection’. Most have their own index-entries, as does ‘propaganda’ although its multiple forms defined in such studies (including the intriguing ‘vertical/horizontal’) are mentioned in the text without analysis. For V., Sicilian support was essentially due to Rome successfully using ‘soft power’; her ‘hard power’ is what the Carthaginians encountered. None of these concepts takes the discussion very far in practice. To read that Regulus’ invasion of North Africa not only ‘ebbe le caratteristiche di una active measure’ (V.’s italics) – as though this accolade from theory was needed – but ‘consapevolmente o no’ constituted ‘una importante risorsa di soft power’ (p. 51), suggests that theoretising has gone so far as to confuse itself as well as the reader.

For Sicilian roles in Rome's war-effort (Part 2), V.’s method is to take what there is in the ancient sources – not always a great deal – and build it up with comparisons from elsewhere or with pure hypotheses (‘non possiamo escludere’ often occurs). First, the fleet which won Rome's first great sea-battle in 260: it must have been built under the supervision of naval architects sent over by Hiero II (pp. 64–70). He is surely right not to believe in a powerful pre-264 Roman navy, but crediting totally unattested Syracusan personnel as the masterminds hits the hurdle of Polybius’ well-known statement (1.20.15) that the Romans’ model was a Carthaginian warship captured in 264. Anxious to accommodate this, V. argues (p. 68) that ‘non possiamo perciò escludere del tutto l'ipotesi’ that the Romans, or rather their Syracusan consultants, took ‘alcuni criteri costruttivi’ from the Punic vessel and applied them to their quinqueremes. This permits him to see ‘nella città aretusea la candidata più plausibile per la fornitura del know-how’. That Rome's many Italiot allies, from Naples to Tarentum, surely knew about quinqueremes too does not appeal to him.

With this wind in his sails, V. offers the next Syracusan creation: nothing less than the famous corvus or ‘raven’ device, the moveable ‘boarding-bridge’ with which the Romans nullified their foes’ superior seamanship (pp. 70–4). Since the corvus was devised after the fleet reached Sicily in summer 260, V. not only sees the inventor as a Sicilian but hypothesises (with J.H. Thiel) that it was none other than the youthful Archimedes – a pleasing fancy but entirely a guess, and one not strongly supported by an account, itself suspiciously fanciful though V. does not suspect so, of the savant's later armaments for Hiero's huge and luxurious grain-ship, supposedly including numerous iron ‘ravens’ fired by catapults to grip attacking vessels (Athenaeus 5.43.208d – a story borrowed from Archimedes’ famous grapnels defending Syracuse in 212?).

Twenty years later, Rome's entirely new quinquereme fleet victorious off the Aegates Islands in 241 was, V. holds, adapted by Syracusan experts from a bold (and wholly hypothetical) Rhodian design for quadriremes (pp. 82–101). This is a particularly difficult thesis. True, Polybius does not classify as a quinquereme the fast blockade-runner of Hannibal ‘the Rhodian’, which in 250 eluded the Romans outside Drepana until they captured it using a previously taken fast quadrireme. (Zonaras’ muddled report has a penteres taken by triremes, 8.15.13.) V. argues that a quinquereme was too big to be so captured: Hannibal's ship must have been a quadrireme and his sobriquet indicated that it was of Rhodian type, meaning that the Rhodians must have modernised quadrireme-design (this argument runs dangerously close to circularity). This design Hiero's experts then applied to Rome's new quinqueremes. (V. does not wonder why, on his own reasoning, the Romans ignored as their fleet model the faster quadrireme that had made the capture.) The Carthaginians had only older quinqueremes and some Rhodian-type quadriremes, hence suffered defeat. This complex and fragile argument unpersuasively builds one hypothesis on another.

V. is on firmer ground in suggesting that Sicilian ‘know-how’ was put to Roman benefit in providing foodstuffs, equipment, siege engines and local security forces. Sicilian troops joined the consuls in 263 against Syracuse, and V. plausibly argues (pp. 138–40) that the ‘allies’ who quarrelled with the Romans near Thermae Himeraeae in 259 were not Italian socii but again Sicilians. That a regular classis Siciliensis protected coastal waters for Rome and helped against Hamilcar Barca in the 240s (pp. 109–15) is, however, pure hypothesis – defended by V. simply as ‘ragionevole da un punto di vista ermeneutico’. On the topic of military intelligence he posits (pp. 150–4) decisive contributions by the inhabitants of Panormus, captured in 254, to the planning of seaborne raids on North Africa from 253 on and against Hamilcar's nearby operations in 247–244. Panormitan helpfulness is inferred from the single fact that in 250 (according to Zonaras 8.14.8) they turned Punic infiltrators over to the proconsul Metellus; V. additionally assumes that they were especially well acquainted with sailing conditions to Africa. He does not deal with an obvious rejoinder: that the Romans, too, had been sailing to North Africa for nearly 250 years, as traders (and likewise their Italian maritime allies).

V.’s meticulously scholarly study, with detailed footnotes, is slowed down by a dense and often laboured writing-style. None the less, and even if not all of his conclusions convince, it forms a valuably controversial contribution to the study of Sicily in the first of Rome's Punic wars.