Like beauty, the utility of a sourcebook is in the eye of the beholder. The degrees of success of the selection and organisation of entries, of the extent of commentary accompanying them and of the translations offered, are entirely determined by their perceived helpfulness to the reader. This is certainly true of the volume under review. As the book's material is of interest to archaeologists and classical historians, Etruscologists, Romanists and ancient linguists, it has a wide appeal. At the same time, it will be difficult to satisfy all these types of readership. For example, an Etruscologist will expect to see the entry for the Lemnos stele (1.11), but the accompanying commentary (and extra mention a couple pages earlier) do not fully situate the object in the murky history of Etruscan origins, and it will do little to enlighten a bewildered Hellenist on the significance – or even the presence – of an inscription from Greece in an Etruscanish language. Overall, though, McD. has managed to achieve satisfactorily wide-ranging coverage of the extant textual sources on the peoples of Italy before and during the Roman conquest, and she provides for the most part excellent overviews of her chosen themes. Although I offer some criticism in this review, I must emphasise that the book fills a notable gap in the literature, offering valuable translations of little known texts and thus providing a rare glimpse of the peoples Rome vanquished.
McD. has drawn together a selection of texts from and about the Italian peninsula in the first millennium bce. The entries range from a word or two on a potsherd to lengthy excerpts from the ancient historians, with Pliny, Livy and Strabo heavily represented. The introduction is invaluable for explaining the author's motivations and aims for the book, as she notes ‘what this book is and is not’ (p. 2). Here we learn that the volume emerged from a British university undergraduate teaching module focused on Etruscans, Samnites and Greek colonists in Italy. This explains why it was never intended to include Sicily or Sardinia, nor does it give much space to the smaller named groups on the peninsula. These choices make sense in this context. More problematic is that Old Latin slips through the cracks, so that the Duenos Inscription, for example, makes no appearance, even though it is much older than most of the inscriptions in this book. More Venetic inscriptions would also be appreciated, besides the intriguing writing tablet from Este (5.7). However, there is still plenty to absorb here, and the book is not meant to be comprehensive.
The thematic organisation begins with a chapter on ‘Origins’, necessarily heavily weighted towards the debate over Etruscan roots. Here we are dependent mostly on the accounts of later Graeco-Roman authors, and more archaeological and paleogenetic evidence could have filled out the chapter overview. This chapter would have been a good place to insert the earliest known inscriptions of all the major languages in Italy, including the first known western Greek inscription, which appears in a later chapter, the enigmatic ‘eulin’ on the flask from Osteria dell'Osa (5.1). The Etruscans get a lot of attention in the book for their relative prolificacy: the next chapter, ‘Etruscan Life and Death’, focuses squarely on them. Somewhat idiosyncratically, this chapter includes the neighbouring Faliscans and the Sostratos anchor and accompanying passage from Herodotus: although the anchor was found at the Etruscan port of Gravisca, it does not really illuminate much about the Etruscans. Iconography is somewhat neglected: the commentary on the Orator statue (2.8) and the François Tomb (2.13) do not address the central importance of the associated imagery (the statue in the former case; the scenes on the walls of the latter).
The middle chapters are where the book really shines, evident in the excellent overviews that start them off and introduce each section within the chapters, and in the fascinating entries themselves. Chapter 3, on the Greek settlers in Italy, nestled between the chapters on Italic peoples, compellingly conveys the sense of the Greeks as just one more group among many in this ethnically diverse region. The western Greek tomb inscriptions and ‘speaking objects’ are not so different from those of their neighbours or anyway bear more resemblance to them than they do to the writings of modern times. Chapter 4, the oddly named ‘From Samnites to Italians’, covers a hodgepodge of texts in Oscan and other languages. The legal texts are the meatiest, but there are some gems among the shorter entries, of which the bilingual roof tile inscribed by two women stands out (4.45). In all cases, the translated primary sources are of more interest than the easier-to-find excerpts from the ancient historians, themselves writing at some remove from the events and peoples they describe. The emic texts, laconic, incomplete and abstruse as they are, are the real treasure. One of my favourites is 5.16, a cup from the seventh century bce with a short Etruscan inscription that states to whom the cup belongs, the drink it would have contained (probably mead and water) and who mixed the drink. An early shout-out to the bartender, not to mention the use of the familiar qu digraph from 2,700 years ago: this was a find! The two chapters relating to religion and magic, inevitable given the frequency of that subject matter in the source material, are rather heavy on the Graeco-Roman writers, and Chapter 9, ‘Italy at War’, is almost exclusively so, with only a smattering of sources from the other side of the battles fought to take the peninsula.
The organisation of entries in a sourcebook involves some tough decisions. Throughout the book, many of the entries date to the second and first centuries bce and even from the first century ce, long after the Roman conquest, suggesting that a more fitting title would be Italy Without Rome rather than Italy Before Rome. The inclusion of the late material makes sense as a means of tracing the evolution and decline of these cultures and languages as they succumbed to Roman domination. In fact, a chapter or section of a chapter that pulled together the latest known writing in each language, including personal names, would have been a great conclusion to the book. Furthermore, in each chapter there are texts by and about women that together suggest considerable variation in gender identity construction across Italy. The relative prominence of Etruscan women is well known, but we get hints from some entries, such as 5.32, that Oscan women had some social standing as well. With some reorganisation, a chapter on women could have been easily included. More images of the objects would have been welcome: what does the fascinating cylindrical bronze device (5.8) look like? Also, this archaeologist reader would have appreciated more descriptions of the contexts of the finds, when known, although these are not normally included in sourcebooks. Overall, though, I highly recommend this fascinating book. Its great value lies in the numerous obscure texts that allow us to hear from these vanished peoples in their own words.
