Michael J. Taylor. Soldiers and Silver: Mobilizing Resources in the Age of Roman Conquest.

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Historians have asked how Republican Rome acquired its Mediterranean empire since the period itself, when the Greek historian Polybius posed the question of Rome’s rise as a topic all serious intellectuals needed to consider. In this tightly written monograph, based on a 2015 dissertation, Michael Taylor offers an answer: resource differentials. In his earlier work, Taylor has produced a string of excellent articles on various aspects of Roman Republican military history, so unsurprisingly for him the topic of resources comes down to how many soldiers Romans and their adversaries recruited and how they financed that manpower. Taylor argues that Romans won ultimately because they were able to muster a larger fighting force. The narrative includes a number of fresh and more nuanced thoughts about how Romans paid for and deployed their numerical advantage. The introduction and conclusion gesture to Michael Mann’s theory of infrastructural power, but the granular exposition of ancient manpower and state budgets that makes up the bulk of the volume will appeal above all to specialist readers. What makes Taylor’s work original is his juxtaposition of tallies for Roman resources beside those of Rome’s opponents—namely, Carthage and the Hellenistic kingdoms. The core of the book falls neatly into two parts, each dividing into chapters on the manpower and then finances of Rome and its rivals. The time frame moves from the war against Pyrrhus through the Third Macedonian War (ca. 280–168 BCE). For Roman resources, Taylor relies largely on figures found in extant narratives of Polybius and Livy. For Rome’s rivals, the approach varies according to more heterogeneous source materials. This difference is most noticeable with regard to Carthage, in which discussion perforce relies heavily on Roman authors, with all the rhetorical problems such a perspective implies. But Taylor is duly cautious and provisional where need be, and he ultimately creates a detailed and sound basis for comparison.