The two books under review represent the latest fruits of a long-standing and productive partnership between Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp and Franz Steiner Verlag. The first volume represents the third collection of H.'s work to be published by Steiner, as two previous varia in German appeared in 2004 and 2017. Over the last few decades, H. has almost single-handedly created the field of the study of Republican ‘political culture’, a concept we now hold central to our understanding of the period's history; his contributions grant automatic value to a book like this, although I am of two minds in recommending it. Most of these papers were first published in accessible places; they are all revised and updated here, but not in ways I could judge significant. The major novelties are, first of all, a useful introductory essay summarising the concept of Republican political culture and then turning to a sort of discursive annotated bibliography of twenty-one directions recent research has taken. As usual, H. has read everything, although many themes appeared in some form in his well-received 2004 monograph. It is an irony that H.'s pronouncement at the introductory chapter's conclusion that this is the ‘end of the beginning’, following a quotation of Winston Churchill, for the study of Republican political culture has appeared in his publications for almost two decades now; the beginning's end is taking its time. The second novelty is probably a feature of publication delays, as an essay on Republican spoils precedes its appearance in the edited volume in which it will be ‘originally’ published. In the context of this varia, it joins several other papers which exhibit a unified interest in Roman cultural products as they intersect with political institutions. This repeated theme is probably the book's most valuable aspect, as we may follow in a sustained manner here H.'s developing thinking about how non-written forms of communication support Roman political power. We find papers on state pageantry and public oratory, and then a series of important studies looking carefully at visual culture as bearer of political meaning. In the volume's last paper, H. combines these aspects with memory studies and Matthew Roller's ‘intersignification’ (AJPhil 134.1 (2013), 119–31) to produce a sort of unbounded and dazzling web of interconnected Roman cultural expression, which supported political authority irrespective of medium. Not everything fits these themes: another irony is the inclusion in this, the first of H.'s three varia published in English, of his classic review of the 1999 English reissue of Friedrich Münzer's Römische Adelsparteien und Adelsfamilien in which H. chastised anglophone scholars, not without reason, for overlooking fundamental scholarship in German. Generally, the volume will be useful for readers less familiar with H.'s writing, especially his recent output with its interest in visual culture. However, owing in no small part to his work's considerable importance, I suspect many will find themselves, as I did, encountering these studies for a second time. Like most of Steiner's books, the volume is well produced; for an academic book, it is also comparatively affordable, and I leave it to readers to determine whether its utility justifies the price.
I have no reservations in recommending the second book co-edited by H. along with Sema Karataş and Roman Roth. The volume, collecting proceedings of a 2015 workshop held in Cologne, is a standout entry in an increasingly crowded field of recent work on Roman Italy in the Middle and Late Republic. H. does not contribute himself, but one detects his influence in several papers’ methodology, as well as in the book's overarching political focus. Roth's short introduction asks how to categorise Rome's political relationship with Italy from the Hannibalic War through the establishment of the principate. Was the Italian peninsula the core of Rome's expanding empire, or was it merely another site of Roman hegemony? Or was Rome's political relationship with Italy as a ‘post-conflict region’ after the Hannibalic war characterised by anarchy and ambiguity such that Roman rule was undermined by armed rebellion? We need not choose between these different models of political structure, he argues, but rather it is their interaction which lends the period considerable interest.
The volume's first of three sections contains two first-rate contributions by John Patterson and Cliff Ando, both serving to introduce interlocking themes. Patterson turns to issues of integration and Roman memory, applying methodologies developed by H. for Rome's political culture to investigate Italians’ place in Late Republican society. Focusing on urban architecture and coin types, he notes how Roman elites of the Late Republic suppressed their past victories over Italians in the fourth and third centuries b.c.e., perhaps out of sensitivity to the different role Italians played in the Roman polity by that later date. Ando's conceptual study of territorial sovereignty and Roman legal power highlights the clash between the universalising and abstracting ambitions of Republican imperialism and its ‘messy reality’ (58) on the ground, owing both to Rome's interaction with differently structured states and to the local orientation of Italian development in this period.
These two themes — integration and the tension between global and local — run through the remaining eight chapters, which divide into two sections respectively on the century before and after the Social War. Serving as a hinge between these periods, Guy Bradley gives a deft summary of the considerable recent work on the Social War. He emphasises the problem in grand models and the need instead for the local perspective, as the conflict was ‘patchwork’ in nature, playing out differently in every community, and ‘more like a series of mini-civil wars rather than a straightforward conflict between Rome and external allies’ (183). The local perspective also appears in Marion Bolder-Boos’ chapter on the archaeology of urbanism in Roman and Latin colonies. Rejecting simplistic ideas of Hellenisation or emulation, she argues instead that widely diffuse building techniques or styles created a certain architectural homogeneity, whose aspect however remained dependent upon the local context of their deployment. In this sense, her paper reveals in architectural language the same messiness located by Ando in Roman territorial sovereignty. Landholding, the subject of Saskia Roselaar's essay, is an obvious topic for local contingency, while Roman Roth looks at the various trends that supported elite Roman interests in the expansion of citizenship in Italy before the Social War.
Stéphane Bourdin offers a highly novel contribution on Italian federal or ethnic leagues. While such leagues are often held to have been dismantled by Rome, Bourdin instead argues that many endured well beyond the point of conquest. Why did these political organisations, which arose to fulfil political and military roles for autonomous Italian peoples, continue after Italian autonomy ended? Bourdin intriguingly suggests the answer is found in the Roman military recruitment of Italians by ethnic groupings under the formula togatorum. I note that his thesis insists that these federal leagues and sanctuaries retained their predominantly political character, whereas we know that at least the federal sanctuaries, which he discusses, served multiple functions from political to religious and economic. It seems possible that what we see in the building-up of Italic sanctuaries like Rossano di Vaglio or Pietrabbondante during the second and first centuries b.c.e. is simply how these sites’ non-political meanings eclipsed their political functions. They thus lived on, but for changing reasons; Bradley's essay makes a similar point (174–5). Indeed, it is not exactly correct to say that Italy's federal sanctuaries reveal a plain situation of continuity under Roman rule. Some sites such as the Hernician sanctuary at Anagni seem to disappear altogether, whilst others reveal signs of serious transformation. The spectacular recent discoveries at Campo della Fiera at Orvieto, probably the Etruscan federal fanum Voltumnae, show cult generally continuing well into the Roman period, but the old sanctuary's main cult structures do not go beyond the early third century b.c.e. (cf. S. Stopponi, Annali Faina 2012, 33). Still, I realised in reading this paper that we have not given the spatial and topographical aspects of the Roman levy of Italian troops the attention they deserve. Bourdin's thesis offers a new way to understand how Roman military action reified Italian ethnic differences without focusing on interactions between troops within the legion, a topic which has recently proved controversial. His chapter also points to the potential of some further Hölkeskampian, if I may, thinking: for example, one wonders whether Samnites recruited at Pietrabbondante to fight in the Roman army recalled the site's association with the fearsome Linen Legion assembled at the same spot two centuries earlier to fight against Rome.
The last three papers take up topics relating to the integration of Italians into Roman society after the fractious events of the Social War and its aftermath. A dense study by Wolfgang Blösel interrogates the army's role in this process, ingeniously suggesting that the continuation of armed conflict in Italy down to the rise of Augustus may in fact have presented an important mechanism for enfranchising Italians. In two complementary papers, Sema Karataş and Federico Santangelo look at how municipal aristocrats gained political prominence; both draw significantly upon Cicero.
Contributions in this strong collection are of consistently high quality, and the editors deserve credit for a coherent volume. Throughout, one thing that becomes apparent is that, if we want to understand Italian history in this period in anything resembling a comprehensive way, we need to look to the archaeological evidence. The importance of material culture to this period's political history is something H.'s work has long stressed, and its particular utility to the historical study of Italy is flagged by Roth's introductory essay (12). What is abundantly clear is that archaeology provides our best window into the ‘messiness’ of the Roman imperial project in action in Italy. For this reason, I found the chapters in the section on the pre-Social War period more successful in terms of the volume's overall goals, as the papers on the last decades of the Republic tended to gravitate towards those accounts of Cicero or Appian; another paper looking squarely at archaeological developments in post-Social War Italy would have been worthwhile.
Read together, these two books do well to show how far we have come in recent years in understanding the political history of Rome and Italy in the Republican period as something other than oligarchic factions at Rome directing their unvariegated imperial dominion over Italy. Where might we go from here? One thing both books reveal is that an unwaveringly elite focus continues to characterise our histories of the period. H.'s political culture is avowedly elitist, as he himself acknowledges. In his introduction, Roth notes en passant that Rome's changing relationship with Italy affected non-elites (11), but I have trouble locating them anywhere in the consequent chapters, aside from some gestures to undifferentiated underclasses. Neither of these books has much at all to say about women or slaves; in most cases, material culture means monumental architecture or else objects and images commissioned by the ruling classes. Were those workers building Rome and Italy's grand Republican monuments also attuned to their intersignification? Of course, the telling of Italian history as a history of its elites is not unusual, but it is eye-opening to read these books alongside some recent archaeological results, for example, from the Roman Peasant Project (cf. A. van Oyen, Past and Present (2020), 3–40), which point to very different drivers of historical change in Italy over the same period; as this work suggests, complementary non-elite histories of empire and integration in Italy appear necessary. I do not mean to take away from these books, each of which in its own way helps reveal the forms and mechanisms of political power in Republican Rome and Italy; as we continue to think about the messy reality of Roman imperialism on the ground, however, I suspect we will also find other stories waiting to be told.
