The Roman Clan: The Gens from Ancient Ideology to Modern Anthropology (review)

Early Rome has always been a scholarly war zone. Virtually upon awakening, modern historical criticism found its sea legs with a unflinching exposure of the hopeless "incertitude" of the first five centuries of the history of Rome, by such Age of Reason scholars as Louis de Beaufort (Dissertation sur l'incertitude des cinq premiers siècles de l'Histoire romaine [La Haye, 1738]). Since then, endless debates have raged about the documentary value to be assigned to key literary texts—for example, the first ten books of Livy. At root is a problem of long-term ethnohistory, given that the earliest surviving historical works dealing with early days of the city were written in the second and first centuries b.c.e., long after the period that they described (eighth to fifth century b.c.e.). As in the case of African or Polynesian royal genealogies, the effect of multiple generations of nonliterary transmission on the history of Rome is hard to assess. In the last century, archaeology added a whole other complex layer of data to the debate, thanks to many important discoveries in the city, but the integration between the material and the textual evidence remains problematical.

As a consequence, any serious book on early Rome cannot build on any wide scholarly agreement but must instead create a new self-contained and self-consistent historiographical universe. This is precisely what The Roman Clan sets out bravely to accomplish. Taking the Rome lineage group, the gens, as a convenient point of departure, Smith attempts a comprehensive reconstruction of the sociopolitical organization of Rome in its early days. This interesting move centers on real agents like family and other corporate groups, rather than on abstractions such as the state or the city, to explain the emergence of complexity. Building upon a painstaking review of the available information, Smith argues convincingly that the clans, like many other structures of early Rome, were fluid and dynamic entities, constantly redefined and renegotiated over time and in different contexts. His approach is clearly inspired by recent developments in historical and social anthropology, particularly by the deconstructions of monolithic views of power and hierarchy. However, if Smith had pushed the traditionally unwieldy classical envelope by making a greater and more explicit space for the concepts of agency and habitus, he would have provided his work with a firmer theoretical underpinning.

Smith's main substantive conclusion—that the gens cannot be shown to have yielded power and influence consistently as a coherent pressure group—is slightly anticlimactic. This finding, like most of those ventured in early Roman studies, is debatable, but, more importantly, this categorical view is at odds with the context- and time-sensitive conceptualization of the gens referred to above. Nonetheless, discourse about the origins of Roman sociopolitical organization will for the future be shaped by Smith's ponderous work, making an exemplary historical problem more accessible to nonclassical scholars broadly interested in the role of clans in emerging states.