What is a ‘people’? This perennially-debated topic is at the heart of Bourdin's magisterial tome on pre-Roman Italy (in reality mainly the centre and north, neglected in comparison with the south as a focus of this kind of study — it is one of the work's many merits to consider these areas side by side). B. examines minutely the ancient applications of terms such as populus, nomen and ethnos (author by author, picking up nuances previously missed), whether it had any political content (for B. there was almost none), and how the reality of settlement and gestion d'un territoire related to questions of identity.

This is already an eye-wateringly ambitious project, but B. is willing to engage on multiple fronts (including a thoughtful engagement with wider modern debates on identities). There are really two (meaty) books here. One is about the constructedness of ‘peoples’ in the literary traditions; the other is about the territorial realities which constituted the real peoples, which B. works hard to define and characterize as closely as possible. One might have thought that these were projects semper dissociabiles, but all credit to B. that he applies himself to asserting the contrary. He is well placed to do so, with a fearsome grasp of archaeological case studies (over 1,660 sites form his database) and their implications as well as an ability to read closely with and against the grain of very different written sources (his sensitivity to possible echoes of indigenous Hellenistic traditions in the later Graeco-Roman amalgam, amid all its ideological and historiographical baggage, is noteworthy).

The various chapters deal with the sources (I), allowing (II) identification of the peoples ‘on the ground’. Next (III) the problem of ethnic and political language is broached, with a thorough study of the various literary and epigraphic terminology used for different groupings of Italians; inter-ethnic associations like alliances are also covered (IV). The third part of the work is more archaeological, and moves to consider territorial organization (especially in the Cispadane area) and its links to ethnic identity (and ascriptions of character), including whether there can be a territorial footprint without a political superstructure (V); also considered are the boundaries of territories (VI) — whether ‘frontiers’ political or ethnic, looking at a number of case studies. Frontiers remain important when B. turns to consider mobility of individuals (whether for peaceful or hostile purposes) and (VII) and its impact in the creation of multi-ethnic regions and societies (VIII), one of the most stimulating parts of the work; B. depicts situations more nuanced than the reification assumed in the literary sources, where there is a significant degree of fluidity and contingency. Many threads are drawn together in a final chapter (IX), examining the rôle of other ‘usual suspects’ in defining identity (language, religion, custom); B. stresses the contingency of individual identities, before moving on to explore where this leaves ideas of Italy.

At almost two hundred pages the bibliography has something of Ozymandias about it, but those about to despair at the peerless monumentality of B.'s work will find comfort in the next two hundred odd pages of annexes, the kind of painstaking tabulation and collection which only really survives in a good old-fashioned French thèse. On this material much of the preceding argument is built; and from its meticulous and sure foundations countless doctoral theses and monographs will come to take their stand (but even B. does not care to offer a translation of the Cortona Tablet, 1042–3). Whether the reader's interest is in institutional terminology, Etruscan gentilicia, Oscan names in Neapolis, the distribution of Celtic settlements, Roman triumphs or even ‘moral qualities’ of different Italian peoples, there is something for everyone.

This is not a quick read, but it is not a rebarbative one either. Rich, provoking, thorough, absurdly ambitious and deeply rewarding, it embodies all the best traditions of French scholarship. In going so much further than simply presenting the evidence, B. will not carry everyone with him all the way; but where he does not convince he has laid the ground for future work, and set the agenda. In this careful and judicious, but equally daring, assessment of its individual peoples B. has done little less than remake the peninsula on the eve of Roman hegemony. When future scholars come to study the ‘other’ peoples, or their fates under Roman domination, it will be with B.'s Italy, in all its complexity, that they will have to reckon.