THE ETRUSCAN CITY OF VEII

This is the second volume in the welcome new Cities of the Etruscans series published by the University of Texas Press. Like its predecessor (N. de Grummond and L. Pieraccini [edd.], Caere [2016]), it is intended to collate and disseminate research on a range of topics pertaining to one city, including unpublished material and items not previously presented in English, in order to offer a holistic reconstruction of the site in question. In this it succeeds admirably. The book has considerable ground to cover given that Veii was one of the most important settlements in early Italy and has been excavated continuously for longer than any other Etruscan city, and particularly intensively since the launch of the ‘Veii Project’ by La Sapienza University in 1996. It arranges the material into 25 chapters plus a set of maps, an introduction, a conclusion and an appendix that places the historical, cultural and mythical elements mentioned earlier in the text into a brief chronological framework. The first three chapters present an overview of the city’s archaeology, including an efficient synthesis of findings from decades of work on Piazza d’Armi (V. Acconcia). Chapters 4–16 give a historical account of Veii from the Bronze Age to the fifth century, although some include later material, and the section also includes chapters on epigraphy and defences. Chapters 17–24 focus on material culture, while stories about Furius Camillus and the fall of the city to Rome are discussed in Chapter 25. All the chapters are short, punctuated with useful headings and supported by notes and their own bibliographies, which make them useful for assigning to students who need a quick introduction to a select topic. It should be noted that some will be more useful in this capacity than others, however; while the chapters by Tabolli (on Veii and its closest neighbours), D.F. Maras (epigraphy), F. Boitani (wall-painting) and I. van Kampen (stone sculpture) successfully balance primary evidence and interpretation, others do not give sufficient explanations or references for students to understand where hypotheses start and end. The chapter by G. Colonna on the Portonaccio sanctuary is a case in point: this superb summary of the cult place, which sets out the development of the site from the seventh to the fifth centuries BC with impressive coherence, repeatedly states that different elements were produced by kings, tyrants and aristocrats, meaning those new to the subject would benefit from more context or direction towards earlier scholarship setting out the rationales for these assignations. This is not an issue solely with this chapter, and it is mentioned here simply to highlight that the approaches of different authors will work better for some readers than others. As a whole the volume shows the wide range of studies undertaken at Veii and just how much can be achieved by well-funded excavation projects. Indeed, one of the strengths of the book is how it manages to give a sense of the site as a whole, something that is otherwise difficult to comprehend at times in light of numerous projects and individual areas of scholarship that tend to publish findings separately. Although one could churlishly point to subjects that were not tackled here as extensively as one may have wished, such as water management and analyses of flora and fauna, there are many areas of interest that emerge across reading multiple chapters.