Quicksilver Tarpeia darts and flits across the pages of this immensely learned volume, her form and myth protean. From Fabius Pictor's greedy girl to Plutarch's multifarious figure, W. traces instantiations of the Tarpeia myth (TM) in text, silver and stone, revealing that these tellings are fundamentally about belonging in and under Rome. The volume comprises an introduction and initial background chapter, nine chapters in three parts, a brief conclusion, an appendix of ‘treasonous girls’ and closes with two indexes (locorum and general). The three parts, ‘Tarpeia, Ethnicity, and Being Roman in the Republic’, ‘Tarpeia and the Caesars: from Republic to Empire’ and ‘Tarpeia from the Outside In: Greek Sources and the Roman Empire’, map the shifting contours of the TM from the late third century b.c.e. to the mid second century c.e. Throughout, W. underlines the powerful flexibility and utility of the TM for the teller, marking the ways in which it spoke variously to ancient ‘ethics, gender, ethnicity, political authority, language, conquest, and tradition’ (p. 285). This volume, appropriate for readers who are advanced undergraduates or beyond, evolved from W.’s doctoral research on Propertius (p. xi), and is itself a monumentum to Tarpeia. It will serve henceforth as a foundational text on Tarpeia and her myth, augmenting G. Dumézil's Tarpeia: Essais de philologie comparative indo-européene (1947), Z. Gansiniec's Tarpeia: the Making of a Myth (1949) and A. Semioli's Tarpeia e la presenza Sabina di Roma arcaica (2010). By ensuring that each chapter is self-contained, W. has written this volume in such a way that readers can pick and choose, but only a complete reading will reveal Tarpeia's variegated life in Greco-Roman antiquity.

The introduction outlines the core elements of the TM namely that Tarpeia opened up the arx to an enemy and subsequently died and that this felix culpa led to a joining of Roman and Sabine cultures. W. stresses that, beyond these core elements, the TM is incredibly variable across textual and material sources and that each telling differs in its assessment of the actors, events and in the details (pp. 1–2). For W., the TM highlights ‘Rome's sense and projection of itself’, exposing ‘Rome's evolving views of gender and ethnicity’ (p. 2). W. positions herself alongside Calame's contextualised readings of myth and addresses the interplay between Roman tradition and originality in the TM, reflecting on the mos maiorum and exemplarity and on the myth's origins within the Sabine enfranchisement (pp. 2–9). Chapter 1 explores common and variable elements in tellings of the TM (pp. 19–42), contrasting them with other myths of treasonous women, and exposing how they channel broader themes of woman as ‘weakness, as unpredictability, as transformation, and as city itself’ (p. 21).

In Part 1, W. focuses on themes of group-belonging, ethnicity and gender in Republican instantiations of the TM, namely those told by Q. Fabius Pictor (FRHist Pictor fr. 7), on L. Titurius Sabinus' denarii of 89 b.c.e. (RRC 344.1–3) and by L. Calpurnius Piso Frugi (FRHist Piso fr. 7). In Chapter 2, W. rightly interprets Pictor's telling, with its fixation on Tarpeia's ἔρως for gold and Sabine luxury and deception, as an admonition against elite rapaciousness and competition, as an evocation of the topos of the luxurious and deceitful outsider (Sabine or Punic) and as a discourse on Roman fides in the context of their imperialist expansion (pp. 45–75). I am, however, troubled by her reading of Pictor's telling as an example of a broader censorious attitude towards women, their wealth and public activities (pp. 52–9). To be sure, the sumptuary Lex Oppia of 215 b.c.e. (Livy 34.1), various other restrictions and Plautus' plays (e.g. Plaut. Aul. 167–9, 498–502) bespeak a public interest in such concerns. But W. takes up this evidence and arrives at a disappointing conclusion about women's participation in the res publica, namely that women ‘are more dangerous than useful, or are useful only when carefully monitored or regulated’ (p. 59). I cannot agree. Pictor's greedy Tarpeia speaks more to his own attitudes towards female wealth and authority (compare FRHist Pictor fr. 25), or perhaps to a Fabian posture against Africanus and his wife Aemilia (Polyb. 31.26). It cannot represent all Roman attitudes towards women, as women themselves were active and vital members of Roman society. Witness the primary roles played by Sulpicia, Q. Claudia, Aemilia and other elite matronae in contemporaneous religious rites, Apulian Busa's largesse (Livy 22.52.7; Val. Max. 4.8.2) and Cornelia's reputed interest in the safety of the res publica above political inimicitia (Nep. fr. 59.1–5 [Marshall]). W. is on safer ground in Chapter 3 when she links Titurius' denarii, Piso's telling and their positive images of Tatius and Tarpeia with the recuperation and even valorisation of Sabinity after Cato (pp. 76–102).

In Part 2, W. explores how tellings of the TM from the last years of the Republic and the early Principate speak to individual-belonging in the community of Rome, and she zooms in on tensions between individuals and the res publica as the Republican model of competition and consensus gives way to life under the Caesars. In Chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7, we find that Varro (Ling. 5.41), the Basilica Aemilia Frieze, Livy (1.11–12), P. Petronius Turpilianus' denarius of 19 b.c.e. (RIC I 299), Propertius (4.4) and Valerius Maximus (9.6.1) all contend with and reproduce the paradoxical prominence (linguistic, cultural and topographical) of the TM in Rome. Varro refashions Tarpeia as Vestal, wedding her to the topography of the Capitol and abstaining from moralising or exemplarity as part of a broader discourse on analogy and anomaly in a world facing C. Iulius Caesar (pp. 105–34). W. illuminates how Tarpeia's Vestality and centrality linger in Livy and Propertius (pp. 115, 159, 170–82). I was struck in particular by Livy's moral equivocations and surrender of the Tarpeia exemplum to his reader's judgement (pp. 139–45) and by Propertian Tarpeia's subjectivity, voiced desire and personal uncertainty (pp. 174–5). In these and other tellings, we learn how Rome's transformations under the Caesars transmute Tarpeia.

In Part 3, W. discloses how Simylus (Plut. Vit. Rom. 17), Dionysius (Ant. Rom. 2.38–40) and Plutarch (Vit. Rom. 17–18) employ the TM as a lens on reciprocal belonging and acculturation between Romans and Greeks under Rome. In Chapter 8, we find that Simylus' elegiac Tarpeia betrays Rome to the Gauls during the Gallic sack, due to her longing for Brennus (pp. 225–38); W. reads this revision of the TM as a way to engender familiarity for Roman history in a Hellenistic Greek audience, for they too had suffered at the hands of another Brennus (pp. 234–6). Chapters 9 and 10 reveal how Dionysius and Plutarch move freely between different variants of the TM, play with language and tradition (pp. 242–8, 256–67) and grapple with the blurring of shared identities and the reality of Rome as caput mundi (pp. 253, 273–83).

W.’s brief conclusion wrestles with the afterlife and persistent attraction of the TM for contemporary audiences, and with the ways in which it provokes questions about alterity and belonging in today's world (pp. 284–8).

This volume is meticulously researched and W.’s excellent translations, footnotes, appendix of other ‘treasonous girls’, bibliography and indexes are eminently useful. However, some stylistic choices limit the accessibility of the volume. W. is prone to cryptic or poetic subtitles and to scattering her text with virgules and turns of phrase that echo Henderson (p. xii). While this may delight some readers, it may also bamboozle the unwary. Furthermore, I found myself yearning for some substantial commentary on how Roman women might have engaged with the TM: how would Hortensia or the addressee of the laudatio Turiae have responded to Pictor's or Piso's tellings or to handling the denarii or to viewing the Basilica Aemilia Frieze? At times W. appears to have a fundamentally pessimistic view of women's roles in Roman society; this view is not in line with the latest research by J. Hallett, A. Richlin, M.-L. Hänninen, C. Schultz, J. Rüpke, E. Hemelrijk and others. But, alas, a reader cannot have everything.

W.’s tour de force reminds us of the many paradoxes at the heart of the ‘creation, perpetuation, and expansion of the Roman state’ (p. 288), for Tarpeia captured Roman minds and captures our own.