Between Rome and Carthage: Southern Italy during the Second Punic War by Michael Fronda

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 205 pragmatism with Greek “idle head-in-the-clouds conjecturing,” a simplistic convention that one would not expect of MacMullen (43). And any reader of Ovid would wonder at the statement that educated Romans did not wish to import Greek myths into their religion or poetry (44). That Romans prided themselves on refusing to wage war through sly tricks (44) may be true in principle, but it is hardly compatible with an incident cited elsewhere in MacMullen’s own text (91). And might not sly tricks be pragmatic as well? The four character traits form no neat picture. Ramsay MacMullen is a historian who thinks seriously about methodology. And, in a subject so difficult and intractable as early Roman history, methodological principles need articulation. MacMullen treads a tricky path between hardnosed skepticism and cautious conjecture, and the scales can tip unpredictably from one to the other. In treating the muster of the Roman army, MacMullen announces that the whole subject is “a kind of quicksand in which the learned who asked too many questions have been sometimes sucked down, and never heard from again,” and, although our sources tell us much, “we unhappily know nothing for certain” (52–63). Lest one yield to despair, however, he offers a general guideline. Even though surviving documents are lamentably few, inference from the few to the many is legitimate, especially if there is more than one source and not much disagreement (60). That seems a reasonable rule of thumb. But MacMullen also allows himself to reach beyond the sources or to resort to conjecture where they do not exist. He proposes that Rome’s expansion rested on leaders whose social and military credentials gave them authority and whose good fortune brought the rest of the populace with them (38, 42). He sees the origins of monarchy as a consequence of smaller clans yielding to larger in selection of a single ruler, for that is something that we must suppose (50). Similar supposition dismisses the narratives of our sources on the violent “Struggle of the Orders” in favor of the presumption of “simple horse-trading among power brokers” (73). It is not obvious that a consistent methodology drives the reconstructions of Roman character in this book. But even when the suggestions seem discordant or erratic, they illuminate dark matters and prompt salutary reconsideration. Historians could hardly ask for more. University of California, Berkeley Erich S. Gruen Between Rome and Carthage: Southern Italy during the Second Punic War. By Michael Fronda. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2010. Pp. xxviii, 374. This book attempts to shed new light on one of the most often discussed periods in Roman history, the Second Punic War. It focuses especially on Hannibal’s efforts to win the loyalty of Rome’s Italian allies, and the reasons individual Italian city-states and local elites may have had for either joining Hannibal or staying loyal to Rome. The subject has never been studied from this angle, and thus the book manages to put forward important new interpretations of the Second Punic War, a considerable achievement. The core of the book is formed by four chapters on Hannibal’s relations with individual city-states in four different regions, namely Apulia, Campania, Bruttium and western Magna Graecia, and southern Lucania and eastern Magna Graecia; this is followed by a chapter on Rome’s reconquest of southern Italy. Fronda analyzes in detail the exact 206 PHOENIX reasons that each state had to join Hannibal or remain loyal to Rome. One of Fronda’s aims, as stated on 2–4, is to focus on the “diplomatic failure” of Hannibal to secure the loyalty of more Italian allies. It is a pity that not more attention is given to the nature of diplomacy in the ancient world; as Fronda states (18–20, 286–287), this was probably based on mutual distrust and demands for retribution, but some evidence from other societies would have been helpful. Nevertheless, it becomes clear that in each case the decision was the result of competition within each town, with some elites, especially those who had benefited from Roman rule after conquest in the fourth and third centuries, opposing those...