Anyone trying to reconstruct early Rome is creating myth. The coherency of the myth depends on the knowledge and intelligence of its author, but its nature is inevitably a function of what he or she thinks is important about later, better documented periods. The process is one of imaginative retrojection, bolstered by information critically assembled from texts, archaeology, inscriptions, anthropology, and whatever else may be usefully brought into the process. C. J. Smith's book, The Roman Clan, is certainly a reconstruction of early Rome, nothing less, in fact, than an institutional history of the archaic city, but with an important methodological difference. What S. brings to his reconstruction from later, better documented times is not confined to later Roman history, but includes the historiography of scholarship on the Roman gens beginning in the Renaissance and running through the twentieth century.

The book is divided into two parts. The first, comprising chs 1–4, deals with earlier analyses of the gens; the second, chs 5–11, the author's reconstructions of some of the key institutions of early Rome. It begins, as it should, with a detailed survey and evaluation of the ancient textual evidence for the gens. Ancient definitions are followed by historical, antiquarian, legal, and epigraphical references. The result, as anyone who has had to make the leap from familia to gens when teaching Roman social history knows, is confusion. Nonetheless, some important observations are made, which set the stage for the following chapters. First is that the earliest references to gentes, or at least to gentiles (members of a gens), concern property, specifically intestate inheritance, which went to gentiles in absence of (a) sui heredes — surviving members of the familia — and (b) surviving agnates. But there was no legal hierarchy among members of the gens, as there was among agnates. Rather, each gentilis inherited an equal share. There is no good evidence for collective inheritance by the gens as a corporate body, or for the assumption that the gens was the earliest form of social organization out of which the family evolved. Familia is prior to gens. This is a central theme of the book, which gains credence as the evidence and arguments are presented. At the basis of the gens is gentilitial inheritance, a legal method designed to preserve property by extending intestate inheritance beyond the agnatic family. The early association of gentes with particular private cults is interpreted along the same lines. As the purpose of gentilitial inheritance was to preserve family property, so that of gentilitial sacra was to assure the continuation of familial sacra.

Ch. 2 is an important survey of modern legal, anthropological, and historical interpretations of the gens. S. begins by introducing the two fundamentally contrasting views of the gens that modern scholarship would follow. One was first expressed by the 16th-century philologist Carlo Sigonio, who saw the gens as an artificial, political institution. Opposed to this is the view of the philosopher Giambastisto Vico, who placed the gens firmly in natural law, and posited it as nothing less than a fundamental stage in the development of human society. The ideas of the later scholars surveyed — Niebuhr through DeSanctis, but including Engels, Henry Sumner Maine, and Fusel de Coulanges — fit into one camp or the other, more or less. Somewhat surprisingly the central figure in this chapter is Lewis Henry Morgan. A pioneer in the nascent disciplines of ethnography and anthropology, Morgan used the picture of the gens he found in classical sources, and in the works of contemporary historians, to construct a gentilitial stage in the progression of human societies. For Morgan, gentilitial society follows an initial matrilineal stage, is succeeded by a stage in which family and inheritance of private property dominate, and is itself marked by egalitarianism within the group. Morgan's idealized view of an egalitarian gentilitial society found favour with Marx and was taken up by Engels, from whence it has had wide and remarkably long-lasting currency among archaeologists. The consequences of this are examined by S. in ch. 4.

The fourth chapter on archaeology and the gens is one of the most important of the book, and one wishes that S., with his deep knowledge of the archaeology of early Latium, had made it longer. The chapter presents critical analyses of three recent excavations — Bietti-Sestieri's excavations of the ninth- and eighth-century cemetery at Osteria dell'Osa, Waarsenburg's study of the late eighth- to seventh-century cemetery at Satricum, and the archaic villa ‘Auditorio’ site in Parioli (from c. 550 b.c.), worked on by Carrandini et al. and by Terrenato. It is here that S.'s survey of earlier scholarship pays dividends. For he shows that when archaeological evidence has been interpreted as indicating a gentilitial society, the term denotes the egalitarian extended family structure of Morgan and the anthropologists, rather than anything we know about the historical Roman or Latin gens from the classical evidence.

Part II of the book presents S.'s positive arguments, beginning with a fifth chapter that surveys scholarly opinions about a number of archaic institutions, concluding with a remarkable seven-page survey of Roman history from Romulus to Augustus. The succeeding chapters (6–11) focus on what S. considers the three critical institutions — the curia, the patriciate, and the gens itself. S. argues for the central importance in the early Roman state of the curia, a kinship group, that, like the associated comitia curiata, was neither organized by gentes nor exclusively patrician. The patrician prerogatives exercised in the historical comitia curiata are attributed to that assembly having been, like so much else of the early Roman state, usurped by the patriciate. More originally, S. establishes a connection between this patrician usurpation and the origin of the gens by pointing out that two functions of the historical comitia curiata have to do with (1) succession and (2) the preservation of sacra — both areas that S. had earlier identified as the principal functions of the gens. The establishment of the patriciate, its usurpation of powers and establishment of privileges, together with the tribes, which bore patrician names, is situated in the sixth century. All of this is seen as a function of the rapid territorial expansion of Rome at that time, with the patriciate associated with the successful conduct of war and the principal ownership of newly acquired land. It was at this time that exclusive patterns of land ownership emerged, but not as a process wherein pre-civic communally-owned gentilitial land was phased out by the claims of the emerging familia and the growth of state-enforced laws of private ownership, as the anthropological model would have it, but rather by a political process. Familia preceded gens, and in the sixth century the patriciate invented the latter at the same time as it invented itself, the gens being the organizing principle on which the patriciate was based. The gens provided economic stability by preserving familial property and familial sacra. Families die out, but the size of the gens, and the gentilitial rule that extended intestate inheritance beyond the agnatic family to gentiles, helped ensure that the patriciate would not. Politically, in the early Republic the acephalous gens caused political and priestly offices to be distributed between the gentes rather than being dominated by any one gens. In doing so the patrician gens provided much needed stability in leadership during the political, military, and economic tumult that characterized the late regal and early republican periods. Far from being an old, moribund institution, the gens was a vital and evolving one, as was the patriciate. Despite challenges, both institutions dominated Rome until the political sea changes of the later fourth century, when the distributive function of the gens was first shattered by charismatic leaders, and then replaced by laws that served the interests of the new patrician-plebeian senatorial aristocracy.

The analysis of earlier scholarship on the gens found in Part I of The Roman Clan is groundbreaking and generally unassailable. But there will be serious reservations about some of the historical reconstructions offered in Part II, which is entitled ‘Towards an Interpretation of the Gens’, but which might have been called ‘Debating the Unknowable’. Like many before him, S. uses details that contradict the model presented in the literary tradition — a binary struggle between patricians and plebeians — to construct a more complex and plausible political and social development for early Rome. The question is whether these sparse and often ambiguous details are reliable enough to support an alternative historical reconstruction. Many are not. What is a hypercritic to do when reviewing a book like The Roman Clan? I once compared writing about archaic Rome to playing chess, in that both are conducted at a high intellectual level, but are, in the end, sophisticated games (CP 92 (1997), 202–7). But if one regards reconstructions of early Rome not as history, but as informed myth, one may accept provisional interpretations of the early period that would be plausible in themselves, and that might also help explain the developments and problems of later ‘historical’ periods that mirror them, however darkly. And that is what S. has done. For in analysing the nature and content of some very obscure archaic Roman institutions — in creating his myth — he has consistently asked the important historical questions.