BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 431 in both the Aeneid and Ulysses, though with emphasis on the former. In this light, he gives particularly close attention to Helenus and Aeneas’ effort to comprehend the Sibyl’s prophetic utterance, thus looking closely at Aeneid 3 as well as 6. Pogorzelski’s close analysis of the dimensions of intentional allusion and of accidental intertext might put us in mind of Joyce’s famous claim to be in thorough control of every word in his novel. This worthwhile study demonstrates not only that ancient texts are “enriched by a long tradition of reception” (16), but that cultural works speak through voices of the past and the future, and that cultural, geographical, and political borders are often only imagined. Smith College Barry A. Spence Ancient Samnium: Settlement, Culture, and Identity between History and Archaeology. By Rafael Scopacasa. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2015. Pp. xvi, 352. The scope of this book is ambitious: it sets out to provide a monographic treatment of ancient Samnium in English, a task that has not been attempted since the publication of E. T. Salmon’s classic Samnium and the Samnites (Cambridge 1967). Much has happened since then, both in respect of new archaeological discoveries and in terms of historical approaches to those populations of ancient Italy who did not produce historiographical accounts of their own. Scopacasa’s declared aim is to respond to both developments, and thus to provide a historical analysis of Samnite culture from the Iron Age to the aftermath of the Social War, based on a combination of archaeological and textual evidence within a framework of post-colonial narrative. In this, the author closely—and explicitly—follows the approach laid out by E. Isayev in her study of ancient Lucania, even to the point of providing a useful gazetteer of archaeological sites in an appendix (301–307).1 Scopacasa lays out his argument in five chapters bookended by an Introduction and a Conclusion: “Locating the Samnites” (Chapter One, 18–55); “Society and Culture in Iron Age Samnium” (Chapter Two, 56–118); “The Roman Intervention” (Chapter Three, 119–158); “Settlement and Society between the Conquest and the Social War” (Chapter Four, 159–237); and “The Impact of Rome” (Chapter Five, 238–294). Of considerable interest is the author’s discussion in Chapter Two of the the fourth-century shift from lavish elite burials to monumental sanctuaries, which he convincingly sees as documenting the emergence of a community focused ideology amongst the regional elites (56–118). Although drawing, through no fault of his own, on an incomplete dataset— much of the excavated material has not yet been published—Scopacasa provides detailed tables listing known burial sites broken down by numbers and types of grave goods. This allows the reader to follow the author’s argument, which succeeds in both documenting and analysing quantitative and qualitative trends in the funerary record that do point towards wide ranging changes in the Iron-Age culture of Samnium. It is also in this part of the book that the author manages best to connect evidence and approach, and thus to draw attention to an important transformation in Samnite history, which to this reviewer’s knowledge has not been spelled out in such clarity and detail before. 1 E. Isayev, Inside Ancient Lucania: Dialogues in History and Archaeology (London 2007). 432 PHOENIX Unfortunately, the same is not true of the later sections of the book. In Chapter Five, Scopacasa’s discussion of the burial evidence (276–278) completely lacks the kind of rigour applied to the earlier material. The author’s analysis of pottery consumption (270–276) in the same chapter is based partly on an exiguous number of de-contextualised fragments (Table 5.3) and partly on insufficiently supported assertions concerning the quantitative significance of Greek amphorae in second-century Samnium. Even more disappointingly , Scopacasa omits here to engage in any detail with the significant literature on the consumption of material culture, examples of which abound particularly in relation to the cultural impact of Roman hegemony in Italy and elsewhere. Yet this is precisely what the reader would justly expect from a book whose author is often at pains to...
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Jan 19, 2017
Andreas Rott + 7
Open Access