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Join Wunderry Plus in the Wundery app or on Apple Podcasts. Hi everybody from Wundery. Welcome to another episode of Tides of History. I'm Patrick

Wyman. Thanks so much for joining me today.

For a long time historians and the general public have thought of Rome's rise to power as

essentially a process of conquest. Roman armies marched out year after year, grinding down the city's enemies until first

Latium, then Italy, and finally the entire Mediterranean were under Rome's control.

Sometimes they lost, of course, but mostly they won, and even the losses weren't daunting enough to keep the Romans down for long.

Scholars might argue about the reason for Rome's ultimate success.

Are the Romans more warlike than their neighbors? Could they mobilize greater numbers of soldiers?

Did they have superior political institutions?

But the basic framing as a process of conquest hasn't been in doubt.

Until quite recently that is. Today's guest wrote a book

offering an alternative narrative of Rome's expansion in Italy, one that I found

incredibly compelling and thought-provoking. Nikola Terranato is Esther B. Van Demon, collegiate professor of Roman Studies at the University of

Michigan and director of the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology.

He's the author of a huge number of books and articles on early Roman Italy,

including the recent book that I mentioned,

which is entitled the early Roman expansion into Italy,

elite negotiation and family agendas.

Professor Terranato, thank you so much for joining me today. Pleasure.

So how did you first get interested in early Rome and Roman expansion?

Well, the honest answer is that I started archaeology as an undergraduate at the University of Rome many, many years ago and the first thing they exposed us to were all these statues and art.

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