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Central to Natural Questions 2, on the nature of lightning and thunder, is Seneca's critique of divination by lightning: in particular, he focuses on the Etruscan art of divination, testing it against ‘scientific’ canons of Greco-Roman philosophical thought. In identifying commonality and overlap between the two systems, traditional/religious on the one hand, philosophical/’modern’ on the other, Seneca effects a form of cultural fusion which contributes to the broader phenomenon of (in Andrew Wallace-Hadrill's words) the Roman cultural revolution of the late Republic and early Empire – a revolution which witnessed the rise of the technical/specialist management and application of knowledge at Rome. Book 2 explicitly engages in this larger cultural conversation, but it is also emblematic of a similar merging process between tradition and ‘modern’ rationalism in the Natural Questions generally.

This chapter discusses categories of long-, mid-, and short-distance connectivity in the Mediterranean in relation to Phokaian emporia (trading stations) and colonies (notably Massalia and Emporion). Nodes that appear physically distant from each other were sometimes more rapidly connected because of reduced degrees of separation within the network, which itself lasted for centuries. Massalia, a coastal foundational colony, illustrates the maritime perspective and orientation (cf. Arles, by the River Rhône and oriented to the hinterland, was a mixed settlement). Conflicts over Alalia (Corsica) with Carthaginians and Etruscans indicate the transition from “many-to-many” networks to more hub-oriented networks as zones of influence. Regional clusters may contain not only hegemonic centers but also mixed settlements, some of which were founded in response to Greek settlement (“antipolis” foundations). It is a porous middle ground, both concretely and metaphorically, and it is the middle ground, with its material and cultural “dialogue” among various “actors” (as we see, e.g., at Emporion or in commercial transactions on lead tablets), that constitutes the “edges” of Mediterranean networks.

Trade, interspersed with episodes of violence, was the principal form of interaction between indigenous peoples of the Mediterranean region and Etruscans and Greeks. But even after the Roman military intrusion into the region in the late second century B.C.E., trade continued to be a major element of colonial relations and a significant factor in the history of the colonial situation. Cross-cultural trade in Mediterranean France remained for centuries almost entirely in the form of barter. Coinage, although employed for various purposes within Greek settlements, was little used in indigenous contexts until the first century B.C.E., and there were few low value coins in circulation before that period that could have served the needs of small-scale exchanges. This chapter examines the nature of trade and traders in Mediterranean France. It discusses shipwrecks and the nature of maritime trade and traders, trade enclaves and diasporas, the role of settlements located along rivers in several parallel valleys leading inland from the coast of the lower Rhône basin in trade networks as either native emporia or colonial trading posts, and piracy and trade.

This chapter is devoted to the first explicitly nationalizing reading of the myth of antiquity developed in 1806 by Vincenzo Cuoco, who, in his novel Platone in Italia, recalled the existence at the dawn of humanity of a civilizing people, the Etruscans. In this way, Cuoco, aiming to establish antecedents for the new Italian nation as it measured itself against the French cultural model, could propose the ethnic-cultural unity of the peninsula’s inhabitants since ancient times. At the end of the 19th century, Italian nationalists rediscovered Cuoco’s thesis and saw it as the basis of modern Italian political identity. However, the chapter underlines how this can be regarded as a predatory operation, which overvalued the actual significance of Cuoco’s novel in the cultural context of Italy. It also shows how Cuoco’s novel remained known mainly for emphasizing the cultural primacy of the Italians rather than its assertion of their ethnic uniformity.

This chapter uses the evidence from west-central Italy, home to two of the peninsula's strongest regional groups before the rise of Rome — the Etruscans and the Latins — to demonstrate that the regional groups of the first millennium bce may be traced from earlier than previously thought, and were the outcome of intra-regional social networks in place by the Final Bronze Age or earlier. It proposes that these networks are visible archaeologically in the distribution of certain categories of easily traceable foreign objects, which will have circulated along the paths of the hypothesized networks, moving between sites (nodes). It begins by suggesting that social networks may be a better way to identify incipient regional groups than expressive actions of identity. It then discusses the methods for detecting these social networks through artefact distributions, and concludes with the west-central Italy case study.

The nature of the source material means that our understanding of Agathokles’ activities in Italy will always be patchy. This chapter reconstructs the course of events in the region during his reign as far as is possible. Agathokles’ activities in this region are best understood in the context of earlier Syracusan interventions in Italy. Like them, he entered the region as a result of the ideology of Sicilian tyranny, the absence of a clear border at the Straits of Messana, the pull of internal Italian conflicts, and the desire to have a forward defence against invasion from mainland Greece. The goal was not control of territory per se but the control of movement through that territory.