The Early Roman Expansion into Italy: Elite Negotiation and Family Agendas by Nicola Terrenato

Abstract

426 PHOENIX The volume succeeds admirably in showcasing erudite essays that illustrate the variegated ancient approaches to the marvelous vis-à-vis medicine. At the same time, the near-exclusive focus on Hellenistic and imperial texts leaves little space for a diachronic or longue-durée perspective of this disciplinary or generic alliance. Consequently, the category of wonder comes to acquire an almost amorphous and ahistorical cast, conceived in privative terms as the antipode to scientific or rational knowledge. The chronological limitations also occlude potentially illuminating preconditions and substrates of the phenomenon under examination. Arguably, the primary questions of the volume—how postclassical literati exploited discourses of wonder, and how, conversely, science and medicine struggled to disentangle themselves from these tenacious discourses—trace their ancestry back to contentious fifth-century debates about disease and medicine between proponents of Hippocratic or Ionian medicine and apologists of charismatic modes of healing. How did the stakes and commitments in this long, sinuous debate over the role of the “non-rational” in scientific inquiry evolve between these two watersheds? What accounts for the enduring fascination exerted by wonder on Greek savants over centuries? And how does the relationship between medicine and paradoxography intensify, fade, or mutate with the cultural transition into late antiquity? I raise these questions by way of conclusion not to obscure the value of the book, but to suggest that its topic has resonance far beyond its already considerable scholarly range. University of Toronto Kenneth W. Yu The Early Roman Expansion into Italy: Elite Negotiation and Family Agendas. By Nicola Terrenato. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 2019. Pp. xx, 334. Have our histories of the Roman conquest of Italy neglected the contribution of Italian elites? In this important book, Nicola Terrenato argues that they have and that this oversight obscures our understanding of the broader dynamics of the making of Roman Italy. Once Italians are integrated into the picture, his account becomes less a story of violent imperial domination and more one of negotiation, a grand bargain bringing Italy’s elite families into alignment with Rome during the fourth and third centuries b.c. Thus, he asks in his concluding chapter, “Did Rome conquer Italy or did Italy overcome Rome?” (269). The question is provocative, but it should not be taken lightly: Terrenato is a leading specialist on the subject and has worked on many of these themes for several decades. The book’s long gestation has resulted in a powerfully argued and eminently readable volume, which should be on the shelves of all those working on early Roman archaeology and history. The first chapter traces historical thought on the Roman conquest from ancient sources all the way to the present-day debate between those who attribute Rome’s rise to its particular aggressiveness, and those who attribute it to its desire to defend itself and protect its allies. As Terrenato emphasizes, both sides focus on Rome itself with little regard for the non-Roman context. Chapter Two begins to repair this oversight by situating the conquest in the very long-term social dynamics of Central Italy. The development of Iron Age Italian society from family to extended-kinship groups, and eventually larger collectivities organized in city-states, has been described numerous times before. Terrenato ’s account largely follows established lines in seeing the urbanization process accel- BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 427 erating in the seventh century before reaching completion, at least in Tyrrhenian Italy, by the sixth. He acknowledges problems with the evolutionary concept of the primordial Central Italian gens, but ultimately favors the idea that clans or extended lineage groups formed the basis of early Italian society. These elite groups were highly mobile, while they interacted in increasingly formalized modes of commensality, ritual, or gift exchange. More and more, such activities concentrated in urban settlements for convenience. Early Italian cities thus functioned as stages for elite political interaction, but urbanization and state-formation by no means marked the end of these groups, who retained their own private interests. Chapter Three is a brilliantly original contextualization of the consequent expansion of one such city state, Rome. Case studies of Syracuse, Carthage, Marseille, and Tarquinia demonstrate that early Roman expansion took place...