The first and longest chapter (pp. 19-221) deals with Greek plots present in the history of Rome, from the foundation of the city to the Gallic sack. I will mention one. The centrality of Romulus' character has resulted in an appeal to prestigious role models and ennobling themes: there is, for example, a very strong parallelism between the tale of the birth of the first king and Herodotus' account of Cyrus' childhood (1.108-13). This narration in turn shows signs of the influence of a far more ancient myth of royal birth of Eastern origins, in which the founder of a kingdom was always the son of a god or priestess, who is rescued after being abandoned to the waters. The births of these individuals are often announced in dreams and surrounded by miracles and prodigies.

The second chapter (pp. 223-89) attempts to synthesise the data in order to deepen understanding of the reasons for and the meaning of the historiographical models. S. examines why the first Roman historians wrote in Greek: either they wanted to address a Greek audience - so as to support Rome's status in international politics - or Latin was still immature in literary terms (thus Mazzarino). From the fourth century onwards, several Greek historians tried to integrate Rome into the Hellenistic context: the intellectuals of the Aristotelian School, Heraclides Ponticus,Theopompus and mainly Timaeus, from whom Fabius seems to have drawn quite often. Pulling Rome into the Greek orbit and opposing her to barbarism meant conceiving her history as inextricably linked to that of the Greeks. The conception of history as a continuum in which cycles are constantly repeated fostered the duplications and the analogies between the events.

S. wonders why the first annalists were so fond of Herodotus. Unlike Thucydides, who rigorously selects data and rejects every element of a mythic or fantastic nature, Herodotus duly reports every grand political and military event, but also shows interest in geography, anthropology and ethnography. He adopts the 'global' vision of the world which is characteristic of the context in which he lives: Periclean Athens. The work revolves around a two-concept fulcrum, the 'universal' and the 'monographic', and there is constant dialogue between them. In the historians' accounts there would also be 'tragic' and 'novel-like' features. Another notable tendency is the taste for pendants and correspondences between events.

After Herodotus, the tragic-novel-like trend that he initiated permeated the work of the Hellenistic historiographers. All the characteristics mentioned above were received and adopted by Roman historians; by Livy, in order to accentuate the tragic exemplarity and gravity of his narrative, and by Dionysius to enhance the utility of the 'verisimilar' and the comprehension of historical facts.

In the conclusion (pp. 311-26) S. presents the results of her research. The parallelisms between the episodes of archaic Roman history and Greek historiography can be sorted into two groups: those specifically Herodotean and those inspired by Greek historiography about tyrants, Herodotean and other. As to the first group, they would mostly be the work of Fabius Pictor. In the fourth century, the idea of Rome as a Greek city would have been common to both Greek and Roman authors. For the Romans it enriched and ennobled ancient times that were poorly documented.

The frame was the 'cyclical' concept of history in which events are repeated, facilitating the individuation (and creation) of parallelisms. Timaeus was probably the Greek historian who synthesised most successfully all these features (interestin Rome's affairs, tendency to consider Rome a Greek city, anti-tyrant ideology, a liking for synchronisms). Fabius oriented his historiographical concept in this direction, and therefore he inserted into the old stories some models of Herodotean plots: the imitation of Greek models constructs and prepares a 'classicism' (retake of a paradigm perceived as 'classic' because it was 'imitable') that would later appear alive and at work in Western historiography, at least until the nineteenth century (thus Momigliano).

S. approaches a complex problem with remarkable competence, examining animpressive quantity of material and providing interesting data. She hints at possible criticisms in the Introduction. There are undeniable schematisms: to mention just one example, the claim that Roman culture was built after the Hellenistic model (p. 16) needs refining. The Etruscan input - decisive culturally as well as in the political and religious fields - should have been mentioned. In particular, it should have been noted that a cyclical conception of time was an important characteristic of the Etruscan world-view (see, for instance, the François tomb, with the re-actualisation of the Greek victory over the Trojans, in an episode linked to Mastarna and the Vibennae).

S.'s approach, which is mainly philological, would have benefited from considering events in a historico-religious perspective, as archaeologists have recently done (cf. A. Carandini, La Leggenda di Roma, I, [2006], Introduction). In particular, the 'historification' and 'mythicizing' processes, which are both marked by a particular Roman 'ideological field' (to put it in Dumézil's terms), could have been considered in the same plane. Roman mythicising takes place inside history; this would have helped to highlight the peculiarities of the Roman 'myths' as opposed to the Greek ones, sometimes too hastily matched (pp. 238ff.).

These slight flaws notwithstanding, this is a work of high quality by a very capable and promising scholar.