BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 207 The conclusion also presents some “alternative scenarios” in order to see whether or not Hannibal could have won if he had taken a different approach. It is always dangerous to engage in speculative history, since the actors in each case would have understood the course of action they pursued as the most logical at the time. Fronda’s analysis, however, indicates that the main alternative course of action, namely for Hannibal to have stayed in Etruria after the battle of Trasimene and create disloyalty among Rome’s Etruscan allies, would have created the same problems that he faced in the south: divided local elites and various inter-state conflicts would have made his eventual victory equally unlikely. On the other hand, Hannibal might have been more successful if he had managed to make his allies fight by themselves, independently from the main Carthaginian army, and given them a more active role in his overall strategy. Fronda never explores this possibility fully, although he does mention isolated Italian military activities. The book comes with fifteen maps, a welcome tool in studying the often confusing events; in short, it presents an insightful and simulating analysis of this crucial period and should be read by anyone who is interested in Rome’s growth towards Mediterranean hegemony. University of Nottingham Saskia Roselaar Local Knowledge and Microidentities in the Imperial Greek World. By Tim Whitmarsh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2010. Pp. xiii, 228. “A people living in isolation on an island,” Tim Whitmarsh writes, “would not think of themselves as ‘local’ ” (2). Indeed, the idea of the local is only possible in the context of what Whitmarsh calls “supralocal perspectives” (2). It is an interesting observation and one that takes on additional cultural and political importance in imperial contexts. As Clifford Ando puts it in his contribution to the volume, “empires distinguish themselves in history, from nation states in quality, and from each other in degree in their success in managing and exploiting diversity” (18). Several of the essays in this volume attempt to grapple in some way with the dialectic of the local and the global (what Whitmarsh characterizes as the “relational nature of identity” [3]) in the early Roman empire. If there is a single question that runs throughout this collection (both implicitly and explicitly), it is this: how are we to understand expressions of local tradition or local identity in the face of ecumenical visions of a culturally and ethnically homogenous empire? At the outset, Whitmarsh locates both ancient and modern responses to this question along a continuum: at one end, Aelius Aristides’ vision of “political and cultural unity of the world under Rome” and on the other, a Pausanian “kaleidoscopic portrait of local cultures” (1). Ultimately, for most of these essays, the question is political; speaking of both the ancient and the modern worlds, Whitmarsh advances, “at least as a working hypothesis,” that consciousness of the nature of the local and its place within a larger whole develops in dialectic with ideas about the global (2). It is precisely periods of intense globalization, Whitmarsh suggests, that focus intention on the local. The best of these essays are challenging meditations on what Greg Woolf describes in an Afterword as the “cultural work” that must be done to model and explain the “ ‘difference yet connectedness’ of distinct communities” (191). Clifford Ando’s essay (like Whitmarsh’s Introduction and Woolf’s Afterword), is a provocative and sophisticated explication of methodological and evidentiary problems. In 208 PHOENIX particular, Ando offers a response to Whitmarsh’s introductory discussion of whether we ought to read expressions of localism as “sites of resistance,” powerful modes of “counteridentification ” (3) that somehow reflect a subaltern subjectivity. Ando addresses what he describes as (and I quote his very precise formulation) “the danger of viewing ancient (or other) societies from an uninterrogated liberal conception of social power [which] would frame as autonomous all supposedly non-instrumental cultural practices, including expressions of local or ethnic particularism, and read them as resistance” (23). Ando’s analysis is top-down: it focuses on the Roman contribution to the “manufacture and sustenance of diversity.” The focus here is squarely on how...
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Aug 30, 2024
Konstanty Zaremba 
Open Access
