Killing for the Republic: Citizen Soldiers and the Roman Way of War by Steele Brand

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 431 in defiance of a long scholarly tradition, of Ulpian rather than Marcian, or Justinian, as the author of the category of the RCO is particularly worthy of note. The book merits a readership beyond the field of legal history. Vanderbilt University Thomas A. J. McGinn Killing for the Republic: Citizen Soldiers and the Roman Way of War. By Steele Brand. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2019. Pp. xix, 370. In KILLINGFORTHEREPUBLIC, Brand argues that the republican Roman army was a militarily effective and lethal force precisely because it was the product of a republican political configuration. The notion that military service was an integral aspect of republican citizenship is not a novel assertion: Claude Nicolet laid out in cogent detail how military service was one of the prime interfaces between civis and res publica.1 The impact that these republican aspects had on the army’s battlefield performance has been less closely examined. While I agree with Brand’s thesis, the book falls short in its attempt to prove it. The book is divided in four parts. In Part I, which follows a lengthy prologue on the parallels between Rome and the United States, Brand reveals that in addition to being a history of Rome’s citizen army, the book will also be a work of reception studies discussing the tradition of republican philosophy. To that end he provides long digressions on Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams. While he hopes that their reflections will serve as a lens to focus our understanding of republican Rome, the excessive attention to authors who wrote before the development of modern historical methodologies tends to obscure the actual historical republic he seeks to reconstruct. He barely engages, beyond perfunctory references in the endnotes, with the vibrant and ongoing historiographic debate on the nature of Roman republican-era politics touched off by Fergus Millar.2 Brand too often succumbs to the temptation to include pieties that he then fails to interrogate. The work praises patriotic farmer soldiers, but very rarely discusses the realities of Italian agriculture (crop yields, labor requirements, land prices, access to ager publicus, etc.), and mostly defers to Nathan Rosenstein’s reconstruction of Roman peasant life-cycles.3 Brand simply assumes that republics produce more patriotic citizens and dedicated soldiers, without querying why certain systemic features might have provided social and ideological links between the common soldiers, their aristocratic commanders, and the abstraction of the state. The author also views the reception aspect of the project through rose-tinted glasses. He writes with great admiration of the American citizenmilitia tradition (the book opens to a scene set in Valley Forge), but never considers that eighteenth- to nineteenth-century U.S. militias seldom proved effective in pitched battle, and were heavily implicated in the projects of African American slavery and 1 C. Nicolet, World of the Citizen in Republican Rome (Berkeley 1980). 2 For example, F. Millar, “The Political Character of the Classical Roman Republic, 200–151 b.c.,” JRS 74 (1984) 1–19. 3 N. Rosenstein, Rome at War: Farms, Families, and Death in the Middle Republic (Chapel Hill 2004). 432 PHOENIX Native American genocide. Here, the comparisons are potentially interesting, but are ignored. Brand does not explore the role of the Roman army in facilitating ethnic cleansing (especially the Cisalpine Celts, a project closely linked to agrarian distributions) or quashing slave revolts. The rest of the book is organized chronologically, with Part II detailing the regal period and early republic, Part III the middle republic down to 167 b.c., and Part IV the civil wars after the death of Caesar (with a brief exposition discussing events from 167-44 b.c.). Much of the analysis is centered around a series of specific battles, with individual chapters devoted to Sentinum (Chapter Five), New Carthage (Chapter Six), Pydna (Chapter Seven), and finally, after things have gone downhill, Mutina and Philippi (Chapters Eight and Nine). These are competently executed military narratives, but the downside of focusing on specific engagements is that the analytic sweep of the book can become interrupted by the operational details. Of course, sometimes the tactical minutiae are indeed relevant to the...

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