The nature of the supposed agrarian crisis of the second century b.c. and its impact on the social and economic development of Roman Italy is currently undergoing a significant re-appraisal (e.g. N. Rosenstein, Rome at War (2004); relevant contributions in L. de Ligt and S. Northwood (eds), People, Land and Politics (2008)). Framed within a wider project being directed by Luuk de Ligt (Peasants, Citizens and Soldiers: the Effects of Demographic Growth in Roman Republican Italy, 202–88 BC, University of Leiden, 2004–9), Saskia Roselaar's own research on the ager publicus in Roman Italy represents an original and very important contribution to this debate.

As clearly explained in ch. 1, the ager publicus was a kind of public land specific to the Roman Republic and — despite being owned by the Roman State — it could be made available in various ways to private citizens. These ways were indeed institutionalized and evolved through time: to provide a comprehensive account of such a development has, therefore, the potential to shed light on relevant dynamics within Roman society, economy and politics. Whereas earlier scholarship has tended to focus primarily on the abstract legal nature of ager publicus, this book endeavours to place it within a wider historical context by relying on an integrated approach and a vast array of sources: from literary evidence to preserved land distribution grids, from legal and technical information to archaeological field survey.

Any such analysis cannot prescind from a geographical and chronological overview of the development of ager publicus, especially in relation to Roman expansion through Italy. Ch. 2 aims at getting a rough idea of how much public land there might actually have been at any time and where it might have been located. A review of the available sources (conveniently summarized in the Appendix) can be taken to suggest that the Romans acquired more land from their conquered enemies than they actually needed. R. thinks the original inhabitants (usually forced into an alliance with Rome) would have been allowed to continue exploiting such lands, although without any legal title over them. This insecurity of tenure would have been employed intentionally by the Romans as an ingenious stratagem to keep the Italian ‘allies’ under control. This would also explain the protests the Italian allies themselves launched against the attempt by the Gracchi to confiscate and redistribute Roman public land, an involvement which otherwise would be quite difficult to understand.

There were different legal categories of ager publicus introduced over time (e.g. ager occupatorius, ager quaestorius, ager censorius). By exploring each of them and their evolution as part of a unified discourse, ch. 3 effectively shows the tendency — and remarkable flexibility — of Roman Republican law towards developing private rights of tenure over such lands. Insecurity of possession limited investments at precisely the right time when the growth of the market for agricultural products and the increase in (inter)regional trade would have made them highly profitable. The gradual privatization of the original ager publicus Populi Romani therefore aimed at answering such economic concerns by introducing new ad hoc land-tenure institutions.

This close relationship with the Italian economy is thoroughly explored in ch. 4. Albeit acknowledging the rôle played by commercial agricultural production and urban market demand, R. tends to underplay it as the main factor behind the competition for land that the second century b.c. increasingly witnessed: the scale of such phenomena would in fact have been rather limited (see also N. Rosenstein, ‘Aristocrats and agriculture in the middle and late Republic’, JRS 98 (2008), 1–26). Furthermore, it was not a question of the amount of land available as much as its location: competition would have been stronger nearer to the market of Rome, in the suburbium, where most land was actually held with secure title by the possessors and therefore not subject to redistribution by the Gracchi. The notion of a coeval increase of the Italian population — to which R. broadly subscribes — only complicated things by increasing the demand for land in terms of both the number of people that needed it for their own support and the larger market they themselves represented for commercial agriculture and its own craving for larger properties.

The Gracchan reforms are therefore ascribed a rather different meaning as explained in ch. 5. Unlike traditional narratives, it was the suitably-located private land of small farmers that the rich were interested in acquiring, not public land. The Gracchi may have either misunderstood this point or intentionally misrepresented it for propaganda purposes. Their large-scale redistribution of the still-available ager publicus did primarily take place in peripheral regions where it had for long been occupied — albeit with no legal title — by the Italian allies. This process had quite a serious impact on the relationship between Romans and Italians and it would have been a direct cause of the Social War a few decades later.

In summary, this book provides a most thorough and integrated synthesis of a crucial subject which is often taken for granted in our own narratives, but whose detailed implications are only rarely fully appreciated. R.'s work is a very important one and will appeal not only to anyone interested in Roman Republican history and the archaeology of the Italian countryside, but also — and perhaps especially — to scholars of the Roman economy, a field where the dynamic relationship between institutions and economic performance is increasingly being emphasized.