Nearly half a century after his original book on the subject, Elogia Tarquiniensia of 1975, reviewed in this Journal by Tim Cornell in 1978, Mario Torelli here returns to the theme, beginning with an emotional and moving account of his despatch to Tarquinia by the relevant Soprintendente to find and bring to Rome an inscription to be photographed, leading him to the Elogia. The complex as a whole had been found in the course of excavation by Pietro Romanelli in the 1930s, to the north of the so-called ‘Ara della Regina’, in fact actually a temple, which T. shows to have been dedicated to Tinia/Jupiter and Uni/Juno, which underwent a number of alterations over the years. It faced onto a piazza, where, so T. argues, there ended all Tarquiniensian triumphal processions: the following discussion of the members of the Spurinas family, to whom the Elogia relate, takes us into a rich portrayal of the élite of classical Tarquinia, of the college of Etruscan haruspices, and of The Tomba dell Orca I and II, the creation of which T. attributes to the Spurinas. The temple also came later to include a statue of the Tiberian personification of Iustitia (71).

The centrepiece of the book is naturally the discussion of the texts of the Elogia and of the so-called Fasti of the haruspices, in fact only five. The discussion deals with exaggerated politeness and with often sharply polemical comment with views dissenting from T.'s, published after 1975; my own occasional dissent should not be seen as weakening my admiration for what is overall a magnificent achievement, beautifully produced.

Although it could have contained a small amount of oil, the so-called ‘Fountain of Cossutius’ cannot seriously be regarded as a ‘vasca’ or bowl (46–9); a provision in Cicero's De legibus cannot possibly show that there was a Roman general law to the same effect (61–2): surely the Roman use of Etruscan haruspices was a matter of custom, perhaps even going back as far as the monarchy; the municipalia sacra were surely the cults of different municipia, not the use of haruspices at Rome (65, 68).

In the long discussion of the Elogium of Velthur Spurinas Lartis f. (98–107), the text printed does not correspond with the drawing in fig. 30, and I can see no trace in fig. 49 of the alleged apex over the A of alterum; moreover, to say that someone ‘had one army, led another army to Sicily’ seems to me complete nonsense; and the claim that the leading of an army to Sicily occurred in the context of Etruscan help for the Athenian expedition against Stracuse in 415 b.c. is naturally only a guess. In the case of Velthur Spurinas II, there is surely no really visible trace of his filiation; in the case of Aulus Spurinas, it would be proper to give the relevant folio number for the inscription cited from MS Vat.lat. 6040. Turning to the Tomba dell'Orca, T. argues that it was later taken over by the Murinas family, with significant damage to the original tomb paintings; that damage is minor, however, compared with the damage suffered by the paintings since their discovery. The numerous, lavish colour plates in the book are, at any rate to the eyes of this particular reader, less intelligible than the magnificent drawings, fortunately made soon after the discovery of the tomb and published in the Monumenti dell'Instituto in 1869–73.

The reference on 44 should surely be to fig. 15, on 56 to fig. 33; improbae comitiae (70) and εὑρητήc (100 and 102) can only be described as horrendous; the map on 42 is at too small a scale to be intelligible, too many of the plans are innocent of a north point, and the figures of a scale.