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This chapter focuses on the cults introduced to Rome between 338 and 201 b.c.e. Roman expansion in the third century b.c.e. led to the first direct sustained encounter with Hellenic culture. The incorporation of foreign divinities continued to help the Romans build connections between themselves and other peoples as they expanded their territorial control. The Greek cult of Aesculapius provided a means of reaching out to southern Italy, as did the ludi Tarentini, later known as the ludi saeculares. At the close of the century, the importation of the Magna Mater strengthened Roman links to the East at a critical moment and suggested continued Roman openness to foreigners, especially as her temple was located on the Palatine hill, traditionally the oldest part of the city. The willingness to find a place for foreign practices within the Roman religious system is symptomatic of the willingness to find places for foreign people within Roman society, and this readiness to incorporate foreigners, rather than simply subjugate them, is a key element in understanding the Roman success in building their hegemony.

The introduction provides an overview of the historical context for the study and lays out the general theoretical framework within which the argument is made. It provides an overview of discussions on ethnicity and identity drawn from the social sciences (anthropology, sociology, political science) relevant to the study. It also discusses the problems of defining foreign cults in Rome, as well as the problems of the source material, especially the historian Livy, that are used in studying Roman religion.

Chapter 1 opens with a survey of the foreign divinities admitted to Rome in the fifth and fourth centuries, including those imported both from Italian cities and from Greece or other overseas territories. Although foreign cults from around the Mediterranean have attracted more scholarly attention, many cities in Italy were also considered foreign, as the evocatio of Juno Regina from Veii in 396 attests. The Roman action in regard to Juno Sospita at the conclusion of the Latin Revolt in 338 is especially noteworthy, as the Romans set out to remake their relationship with Latium at this time. Roman behavior shows them either incorporating foreign divinities into their system or involving themselves in communal sanctuaries outside Rome, both of which aimed at strengthening connections between themselves and their neighbors in central Italy.

The Conclusion summarizes the book's main arguments and explains how the book has explored in detail the well-known and oft-studied willingness of the Romans to incorporate foreign religious elements into their religious system such as cults, priests, and practices. It has examined how this has both reflected and contributed to changes in the sense of the feeling of identity of the Romans as they expanded from a city-state. The Conclusion finishes by looking forward to the study of this subject in the future and the direction in which such study should take.

Chapter 7 discusses integration and the formulation of migrant identity, and endeavours to relate current ideas about the historical value of ethnic identity to the findings about migration of the previous chapters. Although ethnic community formation could occur, it was hardly the dominant mode by which migrants found their way into Rome, and expressions of ethnic origin in inscriptions were selective. Evidence for the use of languages other than Latin and Greek in Rome is almost completely absent. Foreign cults were certainly popular among migrants, but also among many other people, and it is therefore unlikely that they served as an institutional gateway into society. In consequence, migrants were often absorbed in networks in which social and economic ties overrode ethnic ones.

This chapter demonstrates that many slaves at Athens retained a strong sense of their birth cultures outside the Greek world. The evidence for this sense of ethnic identity includes the representation of slaves in comedy, slave participation in foreign cults, and slave epitaphs. One striking phenomenon of their ethnic identity is that some slaves asserted Trojan ancestry as a way of admitting difference without inferiority and of claiming a link with the Greek Heroic Age. The factors that made slaves more or less likely to maintain their ethnic identity included the age at which they were enslaved, the degree of autonomy they enjoyed, and their ability to associate with other slaves of the same ethnicity. This last factor depended to a large extent on the number of slaves living together and whether a slave was from a place that supplied Athens with a large or small proportion of its slaves. In contrast to New World slavery, the birth cultures of slaves were often not radically different from that of Athens; nevertheless, the shared ethnic identity of slaves was sometimes perceived as a threat; hence the advice to masters and cities not to purchase too many slaves from one place.