In the middle years of the second century BC, Rome was engaged in the conquest and pacification of what is now Spain and Portugal. They met with determined resistance from several tribes but nobody defied them with more determination and skill than Viriathus. Apparently of humble birth, he emerged as a leader after the treacherous massacre of the existing tribal chieftains and soon proved himself a gifted and audacious commander. Relying on hit and run guerrilla tactics, he inflicted repeated humiliating reverses upon the theoretically superior Roman forces, uniting a number of tribes in resistance to the invader and stalling their efforts at conquest and pacification for eight years. Still unbeaten in the field, he was only overcome when the Romans resorted to bribing some of his own men to assassinate him (though they reneged on the agreed payment, claiming they did not reward traitors!). Though renowned in his day Viriathus has been neglected by modern historians, a travesty that Luis Silva puts right in this thoroughly researched and accessible account. Portuguese by birth, the author draws on Portuguese research and perspectives that will be refreshing to English-language scholars and his own military experience also informs his analysis of events. What emerges is a stirring account of defiance, heroic resistance against the odds and, ultimately, treachery and tragedy.

Following the Second Punic War in 202 B.C. when the Carthaginians were finally ousted from Iberia, Rome thought that they were now in control of the region. Soon, however, they found themselves pitted against an unexpected foe: the native Iberio-Celts, the Lusitanians. With one occupier gone, the Lusitanians took the opportunity to oppose their replacement, the Romans, in an effort to establish their own nation. Led by the charismatic Viriathus, whose example instilled the same kind of fury and devotion as the future Celtic warrior queen Boudica, the Lusitanians began a bitter war with the Romans in 155 B.C. that would rage on and off for the next twenty-five years. Despite their military advantage, the Romans could not at first defeat the Lusitanians, so they offered a peace treaty. A large number of Lusitanians and their key leaders arrived at the designated meeting point, only to be massacred. Viriathus managed to escape the deadly trap and rallied his people to continue the fight. Knowing that they did not have the numbers of trained soldiers to oppose the Roman Army, Viriathus developed a guerrilla campaign of hit-and-run tactics and attrition. After years of stalemate, the Romans once again sued for peace. Following a short truce, however, the war resumed but the Romans still could not subdue the Lusitanians. Finally, they resorted to paying assassins to do what their army could not: kill Viriathus. With his death, the Lusitanian resistance collapsed and Rome secured Iberia as a province of the empire. Based on classical sources and Portuguese and Spanish language archival material, The Lusitanian War: Viriathus the Iberian Against Rome is the first booklength study of this fascinating leader and the important campaign he waged. His style of warfare had a profound influence on future Roman Army tactics when fighting native troops.

Stories about brothers were central to Romans' public and poetic myth making, to their experience of family life, and to their ideas about intimacy among men. Through the analysis of literary and legal representations of brothers, Cynthia Bannon attempts to re-create the context and contradictions that shaped Roman ideas about brothers. She draws together expressions of brotherly love and rivalry around an idealized notion of fraternity: fraternal pietas--the traditional Roman virtue that combined affection and duty in kinship. Romans believed that the relationship between brothers was especially close since their natural kinship made them nearly alter egos. Because of this special status, the fraternal relationship became a model for Romans of relationships between friends, lovers, and soldiers. The fraternal relationship first took shape at home, where inheritance laws and practices fostered cooperation among brothers in managing family property and caring for relatives. Appeals to fraternal pietas in political rhetoric drew a large audience in the forum, because brothers' devotion symbolized the mos maiorum, the traditional morality that grounded Roman politics and celebrated brothers fighting together on the battlefield. Fraternal pietas and fratricide became powerful metaphors for Romans as they grappled with the experience of recurrent civil war in the late Republic and with the changes brought by empire. Mythological figures like Romulus and Remus epitomized the fraternal symbolism that pervaded Roman society and culture. In The Brothers of Romulus, Bannon combines literary criticism with historical legal analysis for a better understanding of Roman conceptions of brotherhood.