Identity studies live. This latest batch of publications explores what made not just the Romans but the Italians, Christians, and Etruscans who they were. We begin with both age and beauty, the fruits of a special exhibition at the Badischen Landesmuseum Karlsruhe in the first half of 2018 into the most famous of Roman predecessors, the Etruscans.Footnote ¹ Most of the exhibits on display come from Italian museums, but the interpretative essays that break up the catalogue – which are also richly illustrated – are by both Italian and German scholars. These are split between five overarching sections covering introductory affairs, the ages of the princes and of the city-states, the Etruscans’ relationship with Rome, and modern reception. The first contains essays treating Etruscan origins, history, identity, and settlement area. The second begins with the early Iron Age Villanova site, before turning to early Etruscan aristocratic culture, including banqueting, burials, language, writing, and seafaring. The third and longest section considers the heyday of Etruscan civilization and covers engineering and infrastructure, crafts and production, munitions, women's roles, daily life, dance, sport, funerary culture, wall painting, religious culture, and art. The fourth section treats both the confrontation between Etruscan and Roman culture and the persistence of the former after ‘conquest’ by the latter. The fifth section contains one essay on the modern inheritance of the Etruscan ‘myth’ and one on the history of scholarship on the Etruscans. Three aspects to this volume deserve particular praise. First, it includes not only a huge range of material artefacts but also individual essays on Etruscan production in gold, ceramic, ivory, terracotta, and bronze. Second, there is a recurring interest in the interconnections between the Etruscans and other cultures, not just Romans but Greeks, Iberians, Celts, Carthaginians, and other Italian peoples. Third, it includes the history of the reception of Etruscan culture. Amid the just-shy-of-200 objects included (almost every one with description and high-quality colour image), the reader can find everything from a mid-seventh-century pitcher made from an Egyptian ostrich egg painted with birds, flowers, and dancers (147), through the well-known third- or second-century bc Tabula Cortonensis – a lengthy and only partially deciphered Etruscan inscription that documents either a legal transaction or a funerary ceremony (311) – to the 2017 kit of the Etruschi Livorno American Football team (364). Since we have no extant Etruscan literature, a volume such as this is all the more valuable in trying to get a sense of these people and their culture, and the exceptionally high production value provides quality exposure to material otherwise scattered throughout Italy.

Filippo Carlà-Uhink's study of the birth of Italy considers the long and complex process by which the Etruscans and others came to think of themselves as Italian between the third and first centuries bc.Footnote ² To explain it, he has written a long and complex book. Opposing both linear models of unification and the polarization of either top-down or bottom-up approaches to Romanization, and heavily influenced by the so-called ‘spatial turn’, Carlà-Uhink approaches Italy as a ‘region’ as conceived in the theoretical work of Ansi Paasi.Footnote ³ A region is here defined as ‘an intermediate geographical reality, collocated within a wider political context whilst embracing smaller entities in a broader and more complex context of territoriality’; they are not static but are ‘the result of a never-ending process of negotiation’ (17–18). That process facilitates the desired middle ground in understanding Romanisation between centralized imperial imposition and the complexities of local response; put another way, identities proposed from above must be accepted and incorporated from below in order to stick, which will occur differently in different places. To demonstrate this process for Roman Italy, the book is structured in four substantive (and progressively longer) chapters based on the four key aspects to the formation of regional identity suggested by Paasi: the genesis of a territorial shape, the genesis of a conceptual (symbolic) shape, the emergence of institutions, and an established role as part of the regional system and consciousness. So Carlà-Uhink considers the development of, first, the geographical and administrative concepts of Italy; second, its symbolic shape, specifically its name, ethnicity (i.e. pan-Italic consanguinity), and landscape; third, its mores, soil (in a juridical and sacral sense), army, colonial foundations, coinage, and other institutions; and, fourth and most importantly, its social identity (including the relationship between ‘Italian’ and ‘Roman’ identity, and the thorny question of Roman citizenship). In practice the first three represent a study of Roman perception and the fourth (but longest) the reaction of the Italian people. That reflects Carlà-Uhink's broad contention that ‘Italic identity’ was gradually formulated and imposed by the Romans and then internalized by local populations.

This book is a Habilitationsschrift and collates (very) extensive evidence. It is thus rather exhausting: given the lack of regular signposting, one can frequently find oneself adrift in a chapter, forgetting which of Paasi's regional life-rafts one is supposed to be clinging to. Nor is this a book for those not already well steeped in Republican history – the sheer volume of examples means that there is little space to gloss person, place, or context. That being said, the outcomes are rewarding. That same wealth of detail throws up some gems, like, for example, Hyginus’ aetiological offering for Italy's origins, in which the love child of Odysseus and Circe, Telegonus, accidentally kills Ulysses and then, having realized the mistake, marries Penelope (as compensation?) and fathers Italus. Telemachus, not to be outdone, promptly marries Circe, from which union came Latinus.Footnote ⁴ More importantly, understanding how a mosaic of different people came to see themselves as unified while simultaneously preserving elements of their local identities surely requires precisely such a nuanced approach concerned with both top and bottom, and, while the devotion to Paasi is a little slavish, the gradual coalescence in space, symbolism, institutions, and consciousness here traced is evocative. It also has, as Carlà-Uhink demonstrates, important consequences for other hot topics in the field (the causes of the Social War, for example, with a long discussion of which the book closes).

Next, Catalina Balmaceda takes us into what made the Romans tick.Footnote ⁵ Her new monograph is a study of the changing value of virtus between the first century bc and the second century ad. Her source material for thus approaching ‘virtus in action’ (2) is four successive Latin historians, Sallust, Livy, Velleius Paterculus, and Tacitus. The connection is apposite, as her Introduction shows, because virtus is not only a regular topic in these authors’ writings but also an explanatory tool, as well as a key element in any ancient historical project given their human, character-driven foci; it is thus ‘theme, cause, and core in Roman historical writing’ (8–9). More than that, however, Balmaceda sees virtus as not just moral concept but a political one, and one for which historical writing was the key site of exploration. As a consequence, her study shows not just what this important cultural tool meant to the Romans, but how their historians were central players in its evolution. After an introductory chapter that lays out traditional Republican thinking on types of virtus (virtus-virilis, or ‘courage’, and the more nebulous humana-virtus, akin to ‘moral excellence’) and their (questionable) relationship to parallel Greek concepts, including a lengthy Ciceronian oratorical cameo, we turn to the historians proper. Sallust's rather bitter account of the Jugurthine and Catilinarian episodes both expands the traditional understanding of virtus and argues that these crises demonstrated opposing approaches to virtus in their protagonists, a symptom of the fragmented age, as virtus increasingly slipped into vitium. Livy, more positively, suggests instead not only that virtus was central to the Romans’ historical acquisition of liberties, but that the current difficulties could be solved through the restoration of that historic – and fundamentally social – virtus. Velleius, the ‘historiographical hinge’ (130), believes on the other hand that the Principate itself will restore this virtus, which therefore provides continuity through his history. Tacitus, finally, suggests that virtus itself must change to continue to exist under the Principate (incorporating moderatio, for example, or constantia). In their changing use of virtus, these authors not only expressed but actively changed what it meant to be a good Roman. The portraits of these four historians are unlikely to greatly surprise anyone, and one might differ with points of detail, but the discussion is interesting, and virtus proves an interesting and apposite lens through which to explore both these authors’ relationships with contemporary society and each other, and also the gradual changes in Roman historiography.

Worth brief mention at this point is the second edition of Andrew Wallace-Hadrill's introductory pamphlet on ‘how and why the man who (after so many changes of name) came to be known as Augustus transformed Rome’ (xiv).Footnote ⁶ Wallace-Hadrill, like Balmaceda, is interested in the relationship between changes in the Romans’ political system and their values. The main chapters – on ‘The Myth of Actium’, ‘Metamorphosis’, ‘Palace and Court’, ‘Golden Rome’, ‘Love and War’, and ‘God and Man’ – are unchanged (though with some new typos!), and the book preserves both its light tone and its wide-ranging use of literary, historical, numismatic, archaeological, and artistic evidence. New are an Introduction, which introduces the ancient sources and sketches key moments in recent scholarship on Augustus, and an Epilogue, which looks at Augustus’ legacy in the years that followed. The Introduction is particularly welcome; undergraduates often struggle with relating their own critical efforts to those of other scholars, and a clear account of how scholarly trajectories have changed can only help naturalize that skill. My only gripe would be that the reader gets little sense of those debates in the main text; some sketches of the paths of scholarly disagreement would be a boon to the neophyte. Most important, however, are the updated bibliographic essays that provide suggestions for further reading. The original volume was published in 1993, and the intervening twenty-five years have seen a boom in Augustan studies because of the various conferences, digs, and publications associated with assorted bimillennial anniversaries. The updated bibliographies mean that this remains perhaps the best short introductory guide to Augustus for sixth-formers and first-year undergraduates.

At the end of Wallace-Hadrill's new Epilogue he comments: ‘As for the city of Rome, it prospered as never before under the new regime. Demographically it boomed’ (136). That thriving population is the subject of the latest addition to the Bloomsbury Sources in Ancient History series.Footnote ⁷ Eleven chapters provide an interesting range of sources on the city of Rome, incorporating some unusual thematic choices – ‘The City by Day and Night’, for example, or ‘The City Under Siege: Natural and Man-Made Disasters’. These serve the authors’ intention to ‘place the sites of the city in the context of the lived experience of its inhabitants’ (1), and this they achieve nicely, from tortuous attempts to give directions in a world without house numbers (28–9) to a fan of the races so ardent that he threw himself on his favourite charioteer's funeral pyre (100). This is a picture of a Rome teeming with life, a city defined by its inhabitants of all genders, ages, and classes, and it is a rich and rewarding world in which to walk. But that focus – like all authorial decisions – has its downsides, and here they are, I think, serious. Despite the series’ unreasonable aim to provide ‘a definitive collection’ and ‘a comprehensive survey of each volume's subject’, the authors are clear that they aim to offer only ‘a journey through the ancient city of Rome’ (1). But the overwhelming focus on textual material – there are eleven images and three maps included (compare that with the fifty-six figures in Wallace-Hadrill, above) – means that this is like a journey with a blindfold, listening to a tour guide's discussion of material one aches to see. The limitation is particularly worrying given that this volume is designed as an introduction for undergraduates (at times explicitly addressed in the second person): is another generation to subconsciously internalize the lesson that for Classicists visual is secondary to textual, even in the study of the city of Rome? For similar reasons, the lack of much contextual information concerns me. With all but the briefest comments on date and author missing, the wide-ranging material presented here is homogenized, and the lesson that sources must be read with a source-critical eye goes untaught. Space concerns, again, no doubt have an influence here. But in that case I could gladly lose sources like – under the title of ‘The Building of the Stadium of Domitian’ – Suetonius, Domitian 5: ‘He erected…a stadium’ (117).

A brief commercial excursus. In studies of the Roman economy, the revolution continues. The latest publication from the Oxford Roman Economy Project is their fourth edited volume designed to radically shift our thinking on how the Roman economy worked.Footnote ⁸ This latest collection of high-calibre essays turns attention to the role of the state in Roman commercial activity, regulation, and interest.Footnote ⁹ If the battle against the traditional Finley-ian model of Roman trade as limited, luxurious, and low status has largely been won, then, as the volume's editors, Alan Bowman and Andrew Wilson, muse, ‘questions of both economic structure and performance remain’ (6). Like its predecessors, this volume seeks to mobilize both archaeological and documentary material in pursuit of a quantitative approach. The book is in three sections, treating relevant institutional factors – taxation, legal structures, market regulation and transaction costs, and financial institutions – before trade within and outside the empire. The picture that emerges is of heavy, targeted involvement of the Roman state in trade activity, in terms of both infrastructure and interventions, but which simultaneously made use of and stimulated the private sector. That balance is well illustrated, for example, in Ben Russell's paper on the Roman stone trade. The state's extensive need for stone meant that it had a dominant interest in the stone trade, and the significance of prestige over value necessarily had distorting economic implications. But Russell demonstrates that imperially funded construction, while anomalous in scale, remained rooted in local economies, and thus that the private market continued at the same time, and using the same mechanisms. Nineteen lively essays provide such windows into the complex variety of Roman enterprise. I make special mention of the volume's longest essay, the exciting contribution of David Graf on the Silk Road, which paints an evocative picture of how trade at the Chinese end evolved out of the resale of tribute and diplomatic gifts.

Of similar stature is the new collection of martyr narratives by Éric Rebillard.Footnote ¹⁰ For the study of early Christianity, the identity studies boom meant a flood of studies on martyrdom, since one of the most fecund areas of Christian literary activity was the production of narrative accounts of the lives and deaths of martyrs. Much of this recent work relied upon a collection of such accounts by Herbert Musurillo, which was well known to be problematic in both its principles of collection and its details of translation.Footnote ¹¹ A ‘new Musurillo’ has thus long been a desideratum, and Rebillard's collection was originally designed to fill that gap, although the project became, as he says, something different. The book begins with a careful account of the history of such collections, beginning with Eusebius of Caesarea in the early fourth century, and ranging through the assorted martyrologies of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, the vast collecting energy of the Humanists, Protestants, and Jesuits in the early modern period, and the attempts at ‘authentic’ collections from Ruinart to the present day. Based on a review of the evidence for records of trials of Christians – which concludes (correctly) that, while the records were certainly made, there is no good evidence that martyr narratives made direct use of them before the Constantinian period – Rebillard critiques ‘the assumption that the authenticity of martyr narratives can be measured against a model that was written at the time of the martyrdoms or that relied on official records’ (20). With that principle of collection rejected, he proposes his own. First, his collection is limited to stand-alone narratives, since he is aiming not to document the history of the persecutions but ‘to provide texts for which the question of their status as texts can be addressed’ (21). Second, he restricts his chronological focus to before 260 and Gallienus’ supposed legal efforts to enact toleration for Christianity. Third, he limits himself to narratives in Greek and Latin (which does not, in fact, rule anything further out). He then adds an ‘objective criterion for inclusion: the external attestation to the existence of a narrative about a martyr or a group of martyrs’ (21). In practice, this means texts mentioned by either Eusebius or Augustine. And finally, in line with the Bollandist idea of a hagiographical dossier, when one text is known to Eusebius or Augustine, Rebillard considers all extent narratives associated with the martyr in question produced up to the fifth century. The result is eleven dossiers of narratives on key figures and groups, ranging from Apollonius, for whom no reliable text can be provided, to Cyprian, for whom we get text and translation of a Life and two versions of the Acta. These are presented clearly with well-annotated Greek and Latin texts facing clear and accurate translations.

All collections demand selectivity, and the choices involved are usually controversial to someone. Nevertheless, since Rebillard explicitly makes the principles of collection central to his project, they deserve closer inspection here. Only stand-alone narratives are included; embedded texts ‘that are part of larger writings, the main agenda of which is not the narrative of a martyrdom’ (22) are out. So the martyrdom of Ptolemaues and Lucius in Justin Martyr (Second Apology 2), for example, or the long descriptive letters of Dionysius in Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History (HE 6.40.1–42.6, 7.11.2–25) find no place here. But the accounts of the martyrdom of Polycarp or of the martyrs of Lyons – both of which Rebillard does include – are also both long descriptive letters which contain other material, both arguably have other agendas besides simple description, and the latter only survives embedded in Eusebius’ History (HE 5.1.1–3.3; the fact that it was included in an earlier collection should not elevate it above other texts that might have been – we have no exhaustive list). More problematic, the requirement of external attestation seems a rather odd criterion, both because we cannot always know if the version of the text we have is the one to which an ancient scholar testifies, and because the fragility of our archive means that having such extant references by one of these two authors is simply arbitrary. Finally, the criteria seem to be working at cross purposes at times – initially, only early texts are included, but the dossier principle means that much later narratives can get in if they concern a martyr who is also the subject of an earlier account. In some ways none of this matters – this is after all a collection of martyr narratives, and we can take it as we find it. But fundamentally, it seems to me, what this does not take account of is usefulness. As Musurillo has been for so many years, Rebillard's collection will inevitably be used as a source base for future work on martyrdom. And as a historian my inclination is always for more source material, not less. This collection will, I suspect, prolong scholarly (over-)emphasis on the accounts of Polycarp, the Lyons martyrs, Cyprian, and Perpetua, which were largely the texts least in need of new editions. The more weird and wonderful corners of martyr literature will, alas, continue to be bypassed.

If the second and third centuries in which these texts were produced can be called the age of the martyrs, Hal Drake argues that the century that followed was the age of miracles.Footnote ¹² From Constantine's conversion at the Milvian Bridge to Theodosius’ victory at the Frigidus, the fourth century was bounded by not just rivers but dramatic events chalked up to divine intervention. In the same way that historiography was a locus for negotiations over Roman identity, and martyr literature one for parallel negotiations over Christian identity, so miracle tales were a means for Christians, pagans, and Jews to consider their relationships to each other in the changing imperial landscape. After an introductory chapter on how historians can and should engage with the miraculous that amounts to a lucid assessment of trends and fashions of late antique scholarship from Gibbon to Cameron via the Cold War, Drake considers in turn the aforementioned military miracles of Theodosius and Constantine, Helena's discovery of the true cross, the diverse miracles of the ascetic Antony, the manipulation of the language of miracle by Julian, a similar manipulation by Christians concerning the failures of pagan deities, and Augustine's rhetorical solution to the problem of the absence of salvific miracle in the fall of Rome in 410. Our attention is drawn not just to Constantine's miracle but to its appropriation by Eusebius; not just to Antony's actions but to their ‘literization’ by Athanasius. Chapter by chapter, Drake demonstrates how stories told about the miraculous become more important than the miracle itself, and that this ‘reordering of knowledge’ (137) and ‘change that was taking place in elite discourse’ (156) lay at the heart of the transformation in Roman hearts and minds that defines this century. As the Epilogue shows, by the fifth century, miracle stories could continue even when the miracles of the fourth century had dried up. Many of the episodes here treated will be familiar to scholars and students of late antiquity, but the consistent use of this miraculous lens, alongside Drake's clear, engaging, and often irreverent writing (‘In the great house of Acadēme, historians are the plumbers’ [7]), built on a full and up-to-date bibliography, proves a novel way to bind them into ‘a story of a change in what it meant to be a Roman’ (3).