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Rome at War: Farms, Families, and Death in the Middle Republic. By Nathan Rosenstein. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. ISBN 0-8078-2839-4. Tables. Figures. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. x, 339. $45.00.
This book reexamines the oft-repeated orthodoxy that once Roman Republican warfare had ceased to be a sort of annual outing and had become much more widespread and almost permanent, there was a deleterious effect on agriculture, leading to the ruin of the small farmers and abandonment of the land, and in turn to the succession of land bills that characterised the second and first centuries BG. The author looks at this theory from several angles, in a stimulating series of chapters that present an alternative point of view. One of the salient points discussed in the first chapter is that during...