The Rise of Rome

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 179 nectivity. Criticism aside, both chapters are valiant attempts to link emerging scientific fields to ancient history. If the results are mixed, I suspect the same chapters written in a few years’ time would read very differently. In some sense, the same might be said about the entire volume. If historians right now want to answer questions about who Romans were, or how and what they were doing, this book holds great potential, and that potential also seems set to grow, in some cases exponentially, in the years to come given how quickly these scientific fields are advancing. Mastering the tools of ancient history takes time, and it is obviously impractical for historians to keep pace with biology, genetics, or climate science as well. The inverse also holds true: as “data do not speak for themselves” (153), scientists crossing into the Roman world will benefit from developing research agendas in tandem with historians. The way forward is clearly collaboration: Scheidel states optimistically, but not without reason, that the contours of a truly interdisciplinary history of ancient Rome are now coming in view (7). In reviewing this book in an academic journal, I close with a plea to develop protocols to ensure that such collaboration continues, and we realize this goal. As the intellectual interests of historians and scientists overlap, we need to be sure that their disciplinary practices also find acceptance and common ground. Take something as simple as co-authoring a work. In science, single-author papers long ago went the way of the dodo, while single-author publications remain by and large the norm for ancient historians and classicists. A classicist friend once joked to me that tenure review committees looking at a multi-author paper will assume that everyone except the candidate for tenure did all the work. The point is that it will take more than simply linking forms of knowledge to integrate science and Roman history, but the task seems worth our while. University of Toronto Seth Bernard The Rise of Rome: From the Iron Age to the Punic Wars. By Kathryn Lomas. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2018. Pp. xxii, 405. Kathryn Lomas's overview of Rome’s development from unremarkable settlement ca 1000 b.c.e. to a world power on the eve of the First Punic War has three goals: to synthesize the scholarship of the last few decades and make it accessible to a more general readership, to update the interpretation of early Rome in light of the most recent archaeological theories and discoveries, and lastly to place Rome’s developments more clearly into a wider Italian context. The book’s title places it as a clear successor to T. J. Cornell, The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (c. 1000–264 B.C.) (London 1995) and Gary Forsythe, A Critical History of Early Rome: From Prehistory to the First Punic War (Berkeley 2005), each representing a different approach to the fundamental question for the study of early Rome: how to deal with the literary sources. In general, Lomas steers a conservative path, considerably more cautious than Cornell (and, notoriously, A. Carandini),1 though not as doubting as Forsythe. Her approach, implicit throughout, is fleshed out in a long “Note on Sources” (335–345). 1 For example, A. Carandini, Storia della terra (Turin 1996); La nascita di Roma (Turin 1997/2003); Roma: Romolo, Remo et la fondazione della città (Milan 2000); Archeologia del mito 180 PHOENIX The book comprises fifteen chapters organized into four parts. Given the moderate methodology and the book’s aim to synthesize recent scholarship rather than to provide radical revisionist reconstructions, most of the arguments follow fairly traditional lines with some tweaks and updates. Part I (“Early Italy and the Foundation of Rome”) begins with a brief introductory chapter that stresses the topographical, cultural, ethnic, and linguistic diversity of ancient Italy, and reminds the reader that Rome in the ninth century was not a great imperial power but rather just one of many comparable settlements in Latium. The following chapters alternate between developments in Italy more generally and in Rome specifically

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