In this useful survey, Eric Orlin argues that decisions and claims that were made during the Republican period about ‘foreign cults’, including what constituted such, are important if not key to understanding Roman relations with other peoples and the gradual redefinition of the Roman community from urbs to ethnos. His survey of ‘how the Romans continued to maintain their policy of openness to foreigners while at the same time developing a sharper sense of themselves’ (101) maps each episode within the broader landscape of relations with different peoples, from Veii to allies in the Hannibalic and Social Wars. Although the subject of the work deliberately places its focus on important actions in the realm of cult, O. uses these actions as a means of examining society more broadly.

Beginning with a discussion of ethnic identity, in seven chapters O. considers the introduction of foreign cults before and in the third century b.c.e., the treatment of foreign priests, prodigies, ludi, and the events of the second and first centuries b.c.e. What emerges is a considerable degree of continuity, with the third century (unsurprisingly) appearing particularly important, and with what some have considered a second-century clampdown on earlier openness here seen rather as a time when symbolic actions made further claims about where and how boundaries were to be drawn between Roman and non-Roman. Practices such as a senatorial ban on certain forms of human sacrifice, a ban dated by Pliny to 97 b.c.e., thus form part of an ongoing effort to specify what was and was not acceptable in Rome, allowing O. rightly to note the success of such efforts (197) in Livy's later assertion that the sacrifice of two Greeks and two Gauls in 216 b.c.e. was ‘minime Romano sacro’.

The book brings little that is new, particularly in the second chapter, building as it does on O.'s own earlier work (Temples, Religion and Politics in the Roman Republic, and subsequent articles on Venus Erycina, the pomerial rule, Augustan religion and Roman memory, and Octavian and Egyptian cults) and that of others, notably MacBain (ch. 4), Bernstein (ch. 5), and Scheid (ch. 6). Its value lies rather in the overview that it provides, bringing together well- and lesser-known episodes from the period during which Roman expansion brought inevitable tensions in its wake, to explore these tensions in terms of choices made over which deities to include, and over when, where and how to pay them cult. O.'s discussion of the importance of Lanuvium (ch. 1) is particularly helpful as an early example of the kinds of practices in which he is interested, and fuller examinations of some of the other episodes that are less widely discussed elsewhere would have made the book still more valuable. Important questions are raised in the conclusion, which rightly leave the reader reflecting on the effects of what has been discussed on the imperial period.

O. approaches ‘identity’ sensibly, rightly making no claim as to how the kinds of actions he is discussing were received in the ‘foreign’ communities and equally seeing the redefinition of the community for which he argues as a cumulative effect of multiple actions rather than an intentional delineation. Nevertheless, one drawback of the work is its avoidance of any discussion of how and by whom individual decisions were made, particularly in the middle Republic. The topic is addressed in O.'s previous book, in which he argued for a high degree of co-operation among the group from which temple founders came, but here little attention is given to the question until the last years of the Republic and Octavian/Augustus' time in power. O. frequently claims that ‘the Romans’ acted or thought in particular ways or discusses ‘the Roman mindset’ without addressing the sense in which ‘identity’ is created precisely through discussions over the kinds of decisions and claims that he is addressing. He rightly states (216) that ‘The discourse itself about the contours of Romanness served as perhaps the most important element in the maintenance of clear boundaries for the Romans’, but fails to consider fully how far discourse was articulated in such terms during the Republic itself. He draws usefully on discussions in various other disciplines, such as Barth on boundaries, although he underplays the scholarship currently applying such approaches to the Republican period and perhaps relies too heavily on Antony D. Smith's work on nationalism in his approach to ethnicity, describing Rome as a ‘nation’ on more than one occasion (e.g. 122, 126, 210), despite professed wariness over importing anachronistic terms.

Surprising omissions from the bibliography include Feeney's Caesar's Calendar, Smith's The Roman Clan, and especially Erskine's Troy Between Greece and Rome, which is important for O.'s substantial discussion of Venus Erycina (ch. 2) and was published the year after O.'s own article on that goddess. The book contains few typographical errors, although the inclusion of terms such as ‘a municipia’ (128) and ‘ius conubium’ (158) is regrettable, and of the phrase ‘lock, stock and bandit’ (34) unexpected. Nonetheless, the work remains a positive contribution to our understanding of the Roman Republic.