In recent years books on ancient history by academics have tended to be narrowly focused on the author's speciality and to deal exclusively with particular themes, times or places. While such publications have added considerable depth and granularity to the discipline, they are often of little use to students or tutors attempting to fit the study of a huge swathe of history into a single semester. This is particularly true of the Roman Republic, where many tutors fall back upon the excellent but now somewhat dated texts of M. Crawford (1992) and H.H. Scullard (1982). For an authoritative and relatively modern examination of the Roman Republic as a whole K. Bringmann (2007) has had little competition as an undergraduate textbook.
Therefore, the current text is a valuable contribution to the field as it covers the Roman Republic, the dynastic period and the rise of Augustus in just over 750 pages. The authors explicitly state in the preface that the book is intended to provide undergraduate students and others in tertiary education with ‘the necessary background knowledge for an understanding of the history and society of Rome’. The book may also be considered as a companion volume that fleshes out the material presented in the earlier publication by the same authors entitled Ancient Rome: Social and Historical Documents from the Early Republic to the Death of Augustus (2015).
One factor which may make this volume less useful as a textbook is that it covers the reign of Augustus in some detail, which leaves the latter part of the book somewhat awkwardly straddling the history of the Roman Republic and the outset of the imperial period. While one can appreciate that the authors might have wanted to use the material already researched and on hand, the book may have been more focused had it ended with the battle of Actium. (From a purely practical standpoint, such editing would also aid the student who will find that this text adds some two kilograms to a backpack.)
As it stands, the book has fifteen chapters, which provide a solid description of the historical events of the Republic with numerous excursions into social aspects such as religion and magic, the civic infrastructure of Rome, women and sexuality, and slaves and freedmen (the latter two topics each meriting a chapter of their own). Occasional anecdotes and vignettes from Roman life enliven the text. From Chapter 9 onwards the book is dedicated to a detailed description of political and military events of the last century of the Republic and of the reign of Augustus, a task that is efficiently accomplished. The illustrations are embedded in the text (rather than as a section of plates) and show Roman artefacts – very often coins related to appropriate persons or events.
A work that claims, as does this text, to provide ‘comprehensive coverage of the political, military and social history of ancient Rome’ might be considered as setting itself up to fail given the sheer enormity and complexity of the subject, and indeed there is much here that an academic steeped in a particular aspect of Republican history might quibble with. As a random example, the section ‘Marius and the Germans’ (pp. 415ff.) deals with the Cimbric wars. The authors assume that the Cimbri were Germans, although they were probably Celtic, and describe a ‘decisive’ cavalry attack by Sulla at the battle of Vercellae that did not happen. (The authors often and usefully cite relevant ancient texts, but this practice is neither invariable nor consistent, and they have not done so in this case.)
Another such quibble would be the description of the ‘Temple’ of Vesta in the Roman Forum. The word ‘temple’ is misleading as this building was neither in form, intention or usage what the Romans would understand as a templum. In fact, the Romans themselves made this distinction – cf. Servius (ad Virg. Aen. 9.408): alii tholum aedium sacrarum dicunt genus fabricae, ut Vestae … est.
These examples are given, not to nitpick, but to illustrate the hazards of undertaking a work of such scope; for it is difficult to imagine that any two historians can attack so broad a topic without a few lacunae in their knowledge. Also, the book must, by its nature, include some heroic generalisations without the sort of qualification that would be contained in material aimed at a more specialist audience. Thus, the academic might flinch at the statement, ‘There was no harbour in Ostia in Republican times’ (contra F. Salomon et al., PloS 12(1) [2016], which examines sedimentation in the Ostia harbour from the second century bce), while it is true that Ostia only came into its own as Rome's major grain port in the imperial period. Or again the claim that ‘The consuls were originally called praetors’ only refers to the consuls being so called in their role as military leaders (Cic. Leg. 3.3).
Perhaps a more serious criticism is that the authors do not clearly differentiate their own opinion from acknowledged fact nor illustrate different points of view on some topics. For example, on p. 216 the authors claim that second-century Rome took a ‘deliberately interventionist stance’ in the eastern Mediterranean. Yet other authors (e.g. J. Grainger, The Seleucid Empire of Antiochus III [2015]) have argued in detail that second-century Rome tried to avoid entanglement with the Hellenistic empires of Syria and Egypt and that the senate was generally reactive rather than proactive. Though opposing views can sometimes be found in the useful and detailed bibliographies that come at the end of every chapter, it would be helpful if the authors could point to these alternative views in the main text. Again, when the authors state that Rome was ‘arguably’ responsible for the outbreak of the Second Punic War, it would aid the student to have such arguments explicitly stated, and for it to be specified elsewhere what is individual argument rather than established consensus.
Another point worth raising – and this book is far from alone in this failing – is that the authors do not recognise the full implications of the fact that being an ‘ancient Roman’ was a legal status and thus different from being an ‘ancient Greek’, which was a social distinction. Indeed, it was perfectly possible to be a Roman Greek in the Republic, and a good number of people were. Others were Jews, Gauls, Spaniards and Punic Africans – all Romans with their own customs and social practices, which were very different from each other and the Latins. These ‘other’ Romans had a profound influence in the development of Roman civilisation, which merits greater emphasis than the discussion of Hellenisation on pp. 232–5.
These other cultures fed into the dynamic of Roman society, which consequently changed considerably over the centuries of the Republic, and what is largely a snapshot of Roman society in this book does not adequately reflect ongoing changes in art, law, social mores and religious worship. As well as inadequately reflecting Rome's social diversity, there is little mention of the majority of ancient Romans – who were free peasants, craftsmen and labourers. Social studies and archaeological discoveries are beginning to reveal more of how these forgotten Romans lived and worked, and a twenty-first century book titled The Ancient Romans might have done well to delve somewhat deeper into their lives.
In short, this is an expertly written and highly recommended text, but one can be excused for wishing that it was somewhat more.
