'This is one of the fullest surveys of the problems of early Rome to have appeared in recent years. (...) Alföldi's thesis is that Rome only became an independent sovereign state shortly before the battle of Lake Regillus (496 B.C.). In the earliest times, before a proper city had been built, the community of shepherd-warriors which was the Latin nucleus of the Roman people was 'governed by Alba Longa'. The evidence for this is Roman participation in the festival of Iuppiter Latiaris on the Alban mount and the legends which linked the foundation of Rome and Alba Longa. Later, when Alba Longa declined, Rome passed into the power of Lavinium, which took over the control of the Latin federation. (...) In arguing this thesis Alföldi dismisses most of the grandiose stories about Roman achievements under the kings as romanticizing inventions by Fabius Pictor, the first Roman historian. The same conclusion can be reached by observing how many of these stories are Greek stories in Roman guise. And Alföldi is clearly right in discounting the exaggerated claims made for Rome in her relations with other states. He is right too in reasserting with detailed argument, against Bloch, Gjerstad, and others, the traditional chronology of the Etruscan dynasty at Rome. But his own thesis is impossibly over-simplified. It is not established by the evidence which he adduces for it and it requires the ruthless but implausible elimination of much conflicting evidence. (...) Alföldi is the victim of an over-schematic theory. He believes in linear progress whereas history is very often a matter of fits and starts. What would do most to advance our knowledge of early Rome now is not the manipulation of texts but the location and excavation of the Temple of Diana on the Aventine and of the probable site of the earliest settlement at Ostia. '(R.M. OGILVIE on the original English publication in The Classical Review (New Series), 1966, pp.95-97). From the library of the late Professor Doktor Nikolaus Himmelmann.