[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
This book presents mainly work which was first presented at “The Roman Republic in the Long Fourth Century,” a conference held at Princeton in 2019. Publication was delayed by the pandemic, as the editors note in their short Acknowledgement. The authors include a number of scholars whose names will be familiar to those with an interest in this period of Roman history, including the three editors. Consideration of the titles of both conference and book will reveal at least the chronological period under examination and the introductory chapter, jointly authored by the editors, traces the historiographical development of the idea of a “middle” Roman Republic and introduces the “innovative methodologies” taken by the volume’s contributors. These methodologies tend towards the quantitative, though there are exceptions, and they often approach old questions from new angles.
Chapter 2 by Parrish Wright and Nicola Terrenato offers a case in point by taking a quantitative run at an old topic: the ethnic or geographical origins of the families that came to dominate Roman politics, a concern of scholars for essentially the entirety of modern historical research into ancient Rome. The authors here attempt to categorize and count these families (“clans”), grouping them according to “types of mobility”, and trying to identify their ethnic origins among the people of central Italy (Etruscan, Sabine, Volscian, and Latin). As the authors note, there is a significant number of families for whom the categories they establish cannot cleanly be assigned, and this casts some doubt on the reliability of their specific conclusions. Nevertheless, their overall point remains valid: the fact and specifics of “external” family origins should be taken into account when trying to interpret the actions of political actors at Rome.
In chapter 4 Nathan Rosenstein, an “early adopter” of quantitative approaches to Roman history, takes on the question of how Rome paid for its wars, a topic related to James Tan’s consideration of the workings of the tributum in chapter 3. He understands some of Rome’s decisions in the fourth century to use the population of its growing empire (especially in areas of notable wealth such as Campania) for economic rather than manpower support as a response to the city’s fiscal needs.
The contributions in section II of the volume focus on material evidence, specifically coins, settlements, and agricultural products (floral and faunal). In the first, Liv Mariah Yarrow tackles the question of whether Rome aes rude should be considered a bullion system where the value of the object resided in the amount of bronze it contained or a fiat one, where the value was nominal, determined by some authority. The question has some importance for the relative dating of the RRC 14 and 18 series. Yarrow admirably re-uses data from old sources (E. J. Haeberlin), in part because the original objects are no longer available for study. In the end she concludes that the aes was not in fact bullion, but closer to fiat money with wide variations in weight. She includes an impressive tabulation of data and charts, but the final box-and-whiskers chart may make the argument best, even if it is not quite correctly explained in the text. This chapter also fits well with the preceding two (though they are in different sections) due to the common subject matter of the role of money in various state actions, especially concerning the tributum.
In the next chapter, Tymon de Haas combines the data from several surveys to look at changes in rural central Italy. As he notes, the changes seen in the datasets are not always easy to connect to historical events, and a reader might wonder how many different causal factors could be at play. The three surveys also employed different methodologies, making direct comparison between them challenging. The other main topic of the chapter is land division, with particular focus on the centuriation and canalization of the Pomptine area, where de Haas attempts to estimate the labor costs involved with this massive project.
The final chapter of the section by Trentacoste and Lodwick is on animal husbandry, using plant and animal remains from excavations conducted mainly by other researchers. The contribution was sadly negatively affected by the untimely death of the second author, though some editorial sloppiness is also evident, for example, in the switched labels for “North” and “Central West” in Chart 8.2. Other errors in the presentation of the data are also present.[1] In the end the authors are able to argue for the importance of local and regional agricultural strategies rather than ones imported from Rome and can point to real problems relying on literary texts for understanding what was going on in Italy. They conclude by noting the challenges in working with a relatively small dataset, evident in their analyses, and make the case for more and better data reporting.
In the first chapter of the book’s final section, “Architecture and Art”, Domenico Palombi asks us to look at the Roman urbanism of the middle Republic as a manifestation of “Latinization” in which the traditions of Latium played a major role. As he rightly notes, the city of Rome itself could not provide a model for constructing the urban fabric of the many colonies established. Palombi singles out terraces as an essential element. Penelope Davies next takes up the question of how the many new construction projects in Rome affected the human beings living in it. She borrows the idea of “object-scapes,” repertoires of material culture…which shape human behavior.” She points in particular to new forms and styles, including the Greek influence in temple construction, but also the reformulation of the Forum. The final chapter, by editor Seth Bernard, considers the question of when another Italic people, the Oscans of (mainly) Paestum, “became historical,” borrowing a phrase from Nicholas Purcell. In particular Bernard attempts to interpret some of the scenes of Lucanian tomb paintings as historical and not generic. In part he uses the veristic renderings of men who appear to be magistrates as evidence for portraiture and a desire to depict specific historical situations. The lack of epigraphic evidence is felt.
The book concludes with a consideration by Christopher Smith who uses the Twelve Tables as a tool to reconstruct some aspects of the earlier Republic, beginning with land ownership, including the ager publicus, and expanding to include commercium and thereby the relations with the broader central Italic community, with which Wright and Terrenato began the book.
I want to finish with a few comments about the quantitative aspects of the book. Several of the contributors might be described as members of the digital humanities quarter of Classical Studies, and a larger number regularly deal with quantitative approaches. Lack of care with numbers and measurements not only can invalidate results, but also creates unwarranted openings for criticism of the whole approach.
First it is now very easy for data to be shared, both so that the calculations done with them may be confirmed (that is, that they might be reproduced[2]), and so that others might use them in novel ways. Admirably Trentacoste and Lodwick do this with the data from their contribution via Zenodo, but they are the only ones. The same could be said of the charts, where the code used to generate them (e.g., in R) might also be made available.
Recent work in computational approaches to the ancient world is rife with misuse of numbers, often in the area of false precision, and there are several examples in this work. Anyone working with measurements and calculations involving them should understand how significant figures work and what the errors are in the measurements (and there are always errors). For example, on p. 105, the four-digit 1536°C is wrongly equated to the five-digit 2796.8°F, instead of 2797°F. (There is also a typo in the first number where a 6 appears in place of the first 7.) I’ll leave alone the motivation for providing a conversion in the first place; science works in SI units, not archaic English ones. (On the scientific side, 1536° is presumably meant to be the melting point of iron, but that is actually 1538°, and irrelevant to the discussion here since the creation of alloys does not require melting metals together.)
Another example is the table of p. 153, which offers three lengths in meters, each a sum of smaller lengths: 30,000; 42,300; and 639,476. Surely the first with its four trailing zeroes is an approximation, but to what precision? One digit? Two? Four? Without scientific notation (rarely seen in this genre), it is impossible to tell. And what of the third figure? Are we to understand that someone measured over 600 kilometers to within a meter? The rest of the table contains numbers of one digit, but calculations using those numbers in the last column contain up to six digits. 639,476 * 0.5 * 1.5 = 5 x 105, not 479,607. In this case, these errors do not seem to invalidate the claims made, but they are errors nonetheless. This is an old problem, to be sure, as, for example, the re-used data in Yarrow’s contribution comes from a work that provides weights to the nearest hundredth of a gram even though in more than a few cases the last four digits are all zero, surely proof of much less precision than indicated.
I am a big supporter of increased use of data in historical research (hardly a novelty by this point though recent work in the digital humanities has increased the use of computational approaches in particular), but the field needs to up its game.
The physical quality of the book itself is fine, though the text is typeset a bit too close to the binding, making it a little difficult to read the inner parts of the pages without some effort. In a few cases odd choices have been made for the charts and tables, like the left-aligned numbers in some tables (e.g., 4.1 and 6.4). Many charts use different intensities of gray where black and white would have worked better, especially in the likely photocopies that will be made of the pages (another reason for on-line sharing). For example, the four grays in Chart 6.5 are already difficult to distinguish by eye. Some of the charts could use better labeling: what exactly are the “expon” curves in several of the charts of chapter 6? Editorial consistency across the chapters in charts and tables would also have been welcome and helped to tie the work together. Finally, the various maps seem to lack some attributional data, as all are said to be “Drawn by” the author, but nearly all are surely based on data or images from other sources that go uncredited.
Notwithstanding the issues noted above, this is overall an interesting work, featuring some interesting and promising approaches to this middle period of the Roman republic.
Authors and Titles
- Introduction: A Middle in the Making (Seth Bernard, Lisa Mignone, and Dan-El Padilla Peralta)
Part I Historical Sources
- Italian Descent in Middle Republican Roman Magistrates: The Flipside of the Conquest (Parrish Wright and Nicola Terrenato)
- The Long Shadow of Tributum in the Long Fourth Century (James Tan)
- Paying for Conquest in the Early Middle Republic (Nathan Rosenstein)
- Building up Slaveries in Ancient Italy and the Central Sudan (Walter Scheidel)
Part II Material Sources
- The Strangeness of Rome’s Early Heavy Bronze Coinage (Liv Mariah Yarrow)
- Rural Transformations in Middle Republican Central Italy: An Archaeological Perspective (Tymon de Haas)
- Towards an Agroecology of the Roman Expansion: Republican Agriculture and Animal Husbandry in Context (Angela Trentacoste and Lisa Lodwick)
Part III Architecture and Art
- No Longer Archaic, Not Yet Hellenistic: Urbanism in Transition (Domenico Palombi)
- On Architecture’s Agency in Fourth-Century Rome (Penelope J. E. Davies)
- Becoming Historical in Oscan Campania (Seth Bernard)
Conclusion
- Becoming Political: Middle Republican Quandaries (Christopher Smith)
Notes
[1] For example, in several charts entire categories from the data tables are missing. I thank Dr. Trentacoste for her generous reply to an email trying to clarify my understanding of the data presentation.
[2] See, for example, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2019. “Reproducibility and Replicability in Science.” Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/25303.