During a period in which we are seeing a global resurgence of the ugliest forms of nationalism, the mapping of attitudes to migrant groups and individuals in ancient Italy is enlightening. Isayev's core argument is that human mobility in the past was much greater in Italy than the statistics provided by the ancient sources on total numbers of participants in colonization and state-sponsored incentives suggest. She sets herself the task to explore the nature of and attitudes towards human mobility in Italy during the last millennium bc.
The book is divided into four parts. Part I includes the introduction with an overview of the book and the conceptualization of mobility in the past and present, together with the discussion of the nature of the demographic data available for the last two centuries bc. Part II outlines mobility in earlier centuries for which written sources are lacking by presenting mytho-historical narratives and archaeological material in order to investigate culture-contact, settlement patterns, and colonization. Part III examines the extent to which mobility was anticipated and expected. The author expected a higher level of private, individual movement in antiquity. Part IV concentrates on the concept of place and the way Rome became the capital and the centre of connectivity after the Social War (91-87 bc) when citizenship was granted to all living south of the river Po. The first section is the shortest and the three following parts give attention to the subject matter in equal measure.
This book reminds me of Robert Garland's (Reference Garland2014) Wandering Greeks. Garland also debated migration, asylum, and population displacement; and, after the discussion of these big, contemporary issues, both volumes use various literary sources to cover both factual and fictional writings on the subject matter. However, as an Etruscologist, Isayev brings the archaeological material into the mix and gives space also to theoretical considerations. At 500 pages, the current volume is a much meatier affair than Garland's book. However, the decision to bring Isayev's book out as a hardcover volume with a matching price tag, sadly, keeps it out of reach of most individual academic buyers.
Unlike Garland, after defining mobility, Isayev turns to the population estimates for her area of interest: Italy, and for the state-organised population moves during the Mid- and Late Republic. In the discussion, I was surprised not to see Launaro's (Reference Launaro2011) work on rural and overall populations based on the results of archaeological surveys to which Hin (Reference Hin2013, table 8.1., figs. 8.1 and 8.2) referred and on whose calculations Isayev based indirectly her figures. Nevertheless, Isayev raises the question of individual migration and the lack of categorisation of different mobile activities, i.e. individual, household, permanent, temporary, and seasonal movements, in studies on ancient mobility. Here, she critiques the lack of focus on female movements, even if there are passages in ancient literature on women on the move. She also criticises the use of the passages that concern the expulsion of the Latins from Rome and does not see the ius migrandi, allowing the Latins a right to settle in Rome, as a restrictive measure. Not all scholars agree with this proposition and I have doubts as well.
The existence of foreigners had more to do with social class than anything. Isayev argues that freedom of movement was a norm basing her argument on Broadhead's (Reference Broadhead2002) PhD thesis and his other articles. She emphasises the importance of the cyclical and meandering nature of trading and travelling movements without a certain end point. She underlines the difficulty of discussing the trajectories beyond the second century bc because of the lack of epigraphic habit or Roman history writing. Among the well-defined moving groups were traders from Italy, recognised by their Italic, Etruscan, or Latin names. The extent of travelling by this group, called negotiores, is presented in detail in several of the chapters. The Delos inscriptions naming Italic traders in the eastern Mediterranean get the attention they require.
The fact that the author is a specialist on the (pre)history of Lucania results in giving Lucania a most thorough presentation. In a way, this is refreshing, since scholars have concentrated on Etruria and Latium Vetus long enough. However, this choice results in universalising a local increase of rural settlement in the fourth and third centuries bc, when, in Latium Vetus and Etruria, this process had started earlier. However, the book neatly synthesizes the developments in northern and southern Italy, showing the regional patterns of socio-cultural organisation and the different modes of administration reflected in local settlement patterns. As a researcher of central Italy, I was expecting more discussion about Etruria and Latium Vetus outside of Rome in Part IV.
This book is based on case studies and it takes the reader to pastures new and paths less travelled. Bringing the poetry of Catullus to the analysis of migration and mobility, one of the historical threads the author returns throughout the book, is revelatory. The sections on Plautus and Polybius, the former a writer of fictional plays and the latter of factual history, both contemporary in the second century bc, are contrasted from the viewpoint of the movements they describe. These two writers and their work are placed in their literary and cultural (place and period) context. The texts of Plautus and Polybius allow the integration of attitudes of the period into a presentation that is largely guided by archaeology.
For Isayev the Social War between 91 and 87 bc between Rome and an enemy of many of the tribes and city states in the central and southern Italy is a key moment in forging the kind of Empire Rome was going to be. She sees the Social War as a conflict as much about how Italy should be organised as about where power should be placed. Contrasting Rome and Corfinium as the type of capitals the Romans and Italians respectively had during the Social War is also a novelty. The idea of different modes of government in Rome and in Corfinium is presented as crucial in understanding how the Roman Empire was going to develop, i.e., concentrating power in one centre, Rome, and what the alternative Italia could have looked like. This comparison is made on the basis of archaeo-historical enquiries that point to an Italic model with dispersed settlements and large temple sites, such as Pietrabbondante, as politically important meeting places. However, Italia did not win, so Rome became the centre that united Italy.
Important to understanding unified Italy was the rise of the epigraphic habit in the first century bc. Without this source material, our understanding of individuals' perception of the relationship between a place and their identity would not be possible. After the Social War, many areas of life became Romanized: language, architecture, organization of space, and consumption habits, turned out to be increasingly homogenized throughout the first century bc. In her treatise on the characteristics of place and Rome, Isayev turns to Livy and analyses the speech attributed to Marcus Furius Camillus on the matter of moving Rome to Veii after the Gallic Sack. The analysis of this text allows an exploration of Livy's Rome and the ways the different Latin terms changed in order to define boundaries. From the discussion on the elusiveness of boundaries, Isayev moves to mapmaking in antiquity. This section on Roman mapmaking and geographical descriptions is fascinating. It is not just about drawing maps and the lack of cartographic scale, but about the essence of the place and the periplus, i.e. a narrative that links places on the journey, and itinerarium, a route diagram with places and distances between them. If that sounds like a network study, throughout the book, Isayev uses concepts from network research, such as connectivity and node. In this context, she discusses several theoretical works in geography and anthropology, among which Ingold's (Reference Ingold2011) depiction of place as life-pathways, carried out through time and space that converge and become knotted, forming meshworks. This metaphor is very popular among archaeologists, and it is very suited to this context. It is nice to see that it is also applied in classical studies.
Although the book is thoroughly grounded in a broad literature, there are a few surprising omissions in the bibliography in addition to Launaro's work. In the section on the sea and road networks, no mention is made of Fulminante's (Reference Fulminante2012) network studies concerning the importance of riverine and terrestrial mobility in Latium Vetus. Nor does Isayev refer to her major study on the development of Archaic Rome (Fulminante, Reference Fulminante2014). In addition, no matter what a scholar thinks of Carandini's (Reference Carandini1997) presentation of Rome's (pre)history in La nascita di Roma, any book tracing the origin stories and narratives of the past of different central Italian centres should refer to it. In the discussion of the maps, the concept of mental or cognitive maps, discussed for example by Lynch (Reference Lynch1960) in The Image of the City, could have been used to discuss and explain the fluidity of Roman and Medieval maps.
The figures present the key finds that illustrate migration and mobility, and the number of maps covers the minimum presenting the sites mentioned in the text. I would have expected the general maps with the key sites to have been placed into the introduction or before the appendices, but they were at the very beginning. The colour plates reproduced a selection of the greyscale figures within the text and I am not sure why their repetition was needed. Instead, one could have given the reader more images of other finds related to the themes of migration, mobility, and place. The map of Veii (Fig. 6) is not based on the results in Cascino et al. (Reference Cascino, Di Giuseppe and Patterson2012), and underestimates Villanovan settlement. The best illustrated part of the book is the section with the Lucanian and south Italian case studies. A small matter puzzling me is the fact that, in the footnotes, the books referred to follow neither chronological nor alphabetical order.
Considering the content of the text and the case studies presented, I was wondering if the title of the book could have left out the word ‘place’. This book is ultimately about migration and movement, the concepts discussed in Part I, where ‘place’ features less. ‘Place’ is really picked up in Part IV, even if there are discussions on different aspects of Veii, Rome, and some other sites. It is as if the author had tried to write two different books: one on migration and movement and another on how Rome rose to the capital city. The movement seems to have slowed down in Part IV only to re-emerge in the conclusions.
Despite these criticisms, this book is beautifully written and gives the reader new information and interpretations of the movements in the past. The movement may not have been as free as the author hopes for (considering the ius migrandi and the expulsions of the Latins from Rome), but the emphasis on private movement and migration is a new point of view after so many discussions of colonization and other state-organised displacements in Roman history and archaeology. The book came out after the Brexit referendum, and part of the emphasis on movements and migrations by a UK-based professor can be seen as a comment on present acts. Free movement that now eludes those of us living in Britain can be our daydream reading this book as we appreciate those free in the past who could roam the Roman Empire in its different, expanding forms.
