Guy Jolyon Bradley - The Peoples of Ancient Italy

De Gruyter Reference

The Peoples of Ancient Italy

ISBN 978-1-61451-520-3

e-ISBN (PDF) 978-1-61451-300-1

e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-1-5015-0014-5

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2018 Walter de Gruyter Inc., Boston/Berlin

Cover image: Hut-Urn from Campo Reatino (RI), Italy. Museo Civico di Rieti,

Museum Inv. No. MCR_0052_AR.

www.degruyter.com

Gary D. Farney and Guy Bradley

Although there are many studies of specific ancient Italian groups, we noticed at the beginning of this project that there was no work that takes a comprehensive view of each of the ancient groups the famous and the less well-known that existed in Iron Age and Roman Italy. Italian scholars, of course, have been prominent in the studies of the individual peoples, although significant works have also been written in English, e.g. Salmon 1967, Harris 1971, Dench 1995, Smith 1996, Bradley 2000, Isayev 2007, Farney 2007, Fulminante 2014. Other recent works that have treated more than one Italian group have only dealt with some of them, and they have not had as their purpose to address thematic topics of importance for most, if not, all groups, e.g. Pesando 2005, Bradley, Isayev and Riva 2007, and Aberson, Biella and Di Fazio 2014. In order to discover basic information about some of the less well-known Italic peoples, modern scholars often have had to resort to the short, inadequate entries that exist for many (but not all) of these groups in the Oxford Classical Dictionary , the Encyclopedia of Ancient History , or Pauly-Wissowas Real-Encyclopdie , or even one of the Laterza archaeological guides. For detail, one had to track down periodic archaeological site reports, of which there has been a veritable explosion in recent years, particularly in central and southern Italy. In addition, many important articles about some groups are only found in local Italian presses, of which there were only a few copies ever made. Moreover, some studies have focused on the material evidence for these groups, while others on what the literary sources say about them in particular in more historic periods when they are interacting with Rome.

Nevertheless, many wonderful resources are now available, and help to make this book possible. Most notable, Fasti Online has been a great resource for finding up-to-date excavation notices and information, coupled with the Italian Ministry of Cultures new push to put all of the publications of the various soprintendenze online. It is also hard to overstate the importance of Crawford 2011, which makes inscriptions in a variety of early Italian languages readily accessible. As one will see in each chapter, this work touches nearly every corner of ancient Italian group studies.

At any rate, the current volume has been conceived of as a resource for archaeologists, historians, philologists and other scholars interested in finding out more about an Italic group, or groups more generally, from the earliest period they are detectable (the early Iron Age, in most instances), down to the time when they begin to assimilate into the Roman state in the late Republican or early Imperial period. As such, it endeavors to include both archaeological and historical perspectives on each group, with contributions from the best-known or up-and-coming archaeologists and historians for these peoples and topics. Of course, some unevenness of content from chapter to chapter is to be expected, as, for example, archaeologists tend to talk more about material culture and historians about literary sources, and some groups are only really known from material or literary sources. The language of the volume is English, but scholars from around the world have contributed to it, distilling their incomparable knowledge from a variety of research materials (many, of course, in Italian). An attempt has been made to make the information contained in Greek and Latin writers, as well as in the various ancient Italian languages, accessible to non-specialists and beginners.

We have restricted our geographical limits to the Italian mainland south of the Alps. It may appear arbitrary to exclude the islands. Sicily and Sardinia are part of the modern state of Italy, and were closely linked to ancient Italy. For instance, the indigenous peoples of Sicily, the Siculs, were thought to have had a presence on the mainland as well as on Sicily in mythical prehistory, while Sardinia was closely linked to cities on the Tyrrhenian seaboard before the Roman conquest. Nevertheless, from the third century BC onwards mainland Italy was conceived as a distinct unit that did not normally include the islands, and under Rome the islands were governed separately as provinces. Our focus, therefore, has been on this idea of Italy, Italia , in its more restricted ancient sense.

What do we mean by the peoples of ancient Italy? Some debate has gone into the terminology we use. We have titled the work peoples as we believe this is a useful and relatively neutral term, although the modern conception tends to carry with it much greater implications of political unity (see Bourdin 2012, 173276 for a discussion of ancient terminology). Chapters often discuss ethnic groups, reflecting the impact that thirty years or so of study of the ethnicity of the ancient Italian peoples has had in undermining many previous certainties about the unity and strength of collective identity. Older scholarship echoes the tendency in ancient sources to talk of Italian peoples as clearly defined blocks, who migrate or are founded, or are destroyed (Dionysius of Halicarnassus has a catalogue of these in the first book of the Roman Antiquities ). More rarely do they talk of peoples losing their identity in a gradual sense, or gaining an identity in a contrastive situation. For unusual examples, see Aristoxenus and Strabo on colonial Greeks who are no longer Greek, or Strabo on Campanians and northern Italians, who despite their diverse roots, are all Romans (Aristoxenus in Athenaeus, Deip . 14.632; Strabo 5.1.10; 5.4.7). Much modern scholarship has tended to be suspicious of such monolithic pictures, and suggested that identities were more malleable. These new perspectives have been influenced by the work of anthropologists and sociologists such as Fedrik Barth and Anthony Smith, demonstrating that it is not a given attribute, and not biological, that the strength of ethnic identities varies, and that interaction at boundaries enlivens senses of ethnicity.

There are also, by necessity, chapters on elements, or themes, running through the identities and realities of various ethnic groups their religious beliefs, languages, nomenclature, and so forth. Critical historical moments are also addressed, like the Roman conquest of Italy, the Hannibalic War, and the Social War. There has been some attempt to analyze the presence of these groups in literature, i.e. in the mythology handed down through the Greek and Roman tradition, and in the important writings of the geographer Strabo. And, of course, we feel several of our authors have made significant contributions to discussion of ethnic identity in an ancient Italian context.