After the Introduction, the first five chapters provide the historical narrative, reviewing the history of the region from the period of earliest colonization to Augustus. invites us to consider her book more as an “histoire des mentalites,” focusing on cultural, political, and socio-economic structures, than an “histoire des evenements,” a narrative of events. For example, she argues that eastern mystery cults do not appear to have had much of an impact on Magna Graecia because of greater Roman circumspection after the Bacchanal scandal-and not because of religious sensibilities peculiar to the region itself. herself adopts a Romanocentric point of view where an alternative is possible. This complicates the premise of the book, for it is no mean task to describe Magna Graecia from the point of view of the region, that is from a non-Romanocentric point of view, if Magna Graecia itself existed largely as a matter of Roman perception. notes that this construction of Magna Graecia as a region may have been conditioned more by Roman perceptions than regional self-assertion. At one time embracing the whole of the Greek world, Magna Graecia, or Megale Hellas, progressively shrank until in the Roman period it came to indicate the Greek inhabited areas of Italy from Cumae to Tarentum, the sense of the term that L. The term Magna Graecia itself was elastic in meaning. argues that there is little reliable evidence indicating what sense the inhabitants of Magna Graecia themselves had of a communal regional identity. This may be appropriate despite the existence of a common Italiote League, L. focuses our attention on individual tesserae rather than the whole mosaic. Thus, L.’s approach gives the reader some notion of the diverse economic, political, and cultural character of the region-perhaps at the cost of imparting a sense of Magna Graecia as a whole. carries her emphasis on regionalism to the point where she is often hesitant to generalize about Magna Graecia as a whole, preferring to distinguish between larger sub-regions, such as Campania and the South, or among the individual poleis. argues, local factors may often have been more important than the influence of Rome in shaping events. but localized passions and rivalries being played out in dozens of smaller arenas. L.’s emphasis on regionalism and local conditions reflects the influence of our own recent experience, in which the force driving events is no longer the center-stage competition between the U.S. In other words, the author has attempted to write a history in non-Roman terms that is both skeptical of the ancient Romanocentric sources and places Rome, not Magna Graecia, at the margin of the story. Farney (eds), Handbook on the Ancient Italic Groups.Kathryn Lomas’s Rome and the Western Greeks aims to tell the story of Magna Graecia from the point of view of the region itself, rather than the point of view of Rome. Cooley (ed.) Blackwell Companion to Roman Italy, 253-68. Cooley (ed.) Blackwell Companion to Roman Italy: 237-52. Cooley (ed.) Blackwell Companion to Roman Italy, 217-36. ‘Language and literacy in Roman Italy’ A.E.
École française de Rome, Paris/Rome (2016). Collection de l’École française de Rome 502. Épigraphie et nécropoles à l’époque pré-romaine. Haack (ed.), L’écriture et l’espace de la mort. ‘Hidden writing: epitaphs within tombs in early Italy’ in M.-L. Hughes (eds), Remembering Parthenope : The Reception of Classical Naples from Antiquity to the Present: 64-84. ‘Colonising the Past: Cultural ideology and Civic Memory in the Hellenistic West’ in C. London: Profile Books (2017) and Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press (2018). I am working on a number of publications, including a new edition of a book on Roman Italy, a major new edited volume on Magna Graecia, and a book on Rome and Italy in the late Republic. Since 2008, I have taught part-time at a number of universities and currently hold Honorary Research Fellowships at the University of Durham and the University of Newcastle. I have previously held academic posts at UCL (Research Fellow in History 1989-94 Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of Archaeology, 2002-2008) and the University of Newcastle (Leverhulme Research Fellow, 1994-1997 Lecturer in Ancient History, 1997-2002). My main research interests are in the development of ethnic and cultural identities in ancient Italy and the western Mediterranean, urbanisation and state formation, cultural memory in early societies, and epigraphy and literacy in early Italy.
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