As evangelists for Classics and Roman history argue for the relevance of their subject in the modern world, two unsavoury themes are helping their case: civil war and autocracy. The former has displaced inter-state warfare as the most common type of conflict (D. Armitage, Civil War: A History in Ideas [2017], p. 5). The latter, according to at least one dataset, has overtaken democracy as the most common form of government (M. Nord et al., ‘State of the World 2024: 25 Years of Autocratization – Democracy Trumped?’, Democratization 32 [2025]). The Romans were well acquainted with both, and the volumes under review are alert to the potential for comparison. Though civil war and autocracy are part of a global malaise, the mere threat of them in the United States occupies much of the conversation. The nod is explicit in Maschek’s new introduction, which mentions 6 January 2021 (p. vii); when Potter claims that his ‘is a book about a man who destroyed democracy’ (p. xx), one suspects that readers are meant to think also of Donald Trump. It should be stated at the outset that neither author engages in any ham-fisted parallelism of then and now. Rather, the themes they explore in a Roman context are genuinely timely.

Maschek’s book is a translation of the 2018 German edition; since then the theme has only become more relevant (p. vii). Its goal is to bring archaeology into the study of the crisis of the Roman Republic, without resorting to a corresponding neglect of literary sources (p. 4). This is a sombre exercise. Maschek criticises the scholarly preoccupation with ‘the power of images’, above all in Augustan Rome, which he claims has distracted archaeologists from the late Republic and ‘the fundamental problems of history: hunger and poverty, conflict and violence’ (p. 2). Maschek proposes to examine how the violence of civil war shaped Republican society and culture (p. 16).

The survey begins with Lucius Opimius’ destruction of Fregellae (p. 29), which becomes something of a leitmotif throughout the book. It captures the theme of the first half (‘The Trauma of Annihilation’) and leads into a long survey of Roman imperialistic violence and its impact on the Mediterranean world, beginning in the third century bce. The discussion then moves into the conventionally understood late Republic, post 146 bce, when Roman violence began to impose itself on Italy (‘Escalations of Violence: Causes and Consequences’). Maschek comments on the religious response to this violence and the plunder that came from it. The second half of the book (‘Society and Crisis in Late Republican Italy’) changes tack. Maschek begins by surveying Roman agriculture, urbanisation and demography (‘Cities and the Countryside’), before looking at the impact of civil war on this picture, from veteran settlements, to collapsing land prices and struggling credit (‘Landownership and Society in the Civil War Period’). The final section before the conclusion addresses the rise in monumental public building and a new ‘culture of consumption’ in late Republican Italy (‘Construction Booms and Consumer Behaviour in Times of Crisis’).

There is a great deal to admire. The praise of the German edition on the back cover accurately notes that Maschek demonstrates mastery over an impressive range of archaeological material. He is as strong on the big picture, in the surveys of Roman imperialism (pp. 31–81) and agriculture (pp. 151–8), as he is on detailed descriptions and analyses, for example on the reinterpretation of the reliefs of the Ara of Domitius Ahenobarbus (pp. 139–49) or the case study on land distributions in the Biferno Valley (pp. 208–15). The translation of these accessible, cogent and archaeologically grounded discussions is a windfall for Anglophone undergraduates studying the late Republic. It is also welcome to see Maschek bring so many Romans and Italians into the story. Readers hear not just of elites, but also, for example, about the economic and social diversity of the Roman soldiery (p. 203) and the migration pressures affecting communities across Italy (pp. 173–8). J. O’Donnell’s translation is fluent, and the volume is well produced, with helpful maps and figures, and minimal blemishes. The book is easy to recommend to anyone interested in the Roman Republic.

One problem, however, is that the concept of ‘civil war’ is not given a great deal of thought and becomes, at times, an analytical hindrance. Maschek’s temporal focus is on the ‘crisis period’ of the late Republic (p. 4). Although this target sometimes expands to include the entire second century bce or the six generations between the Hannibalic War and Augustus, following the study on generations by the Spanish sociologist Carmelo Lisón Tolosana (p. 10), the object of inquiry is clear. But the book’s title is The Roman Civil Wars, and those wars, for Maschek, characterise the entire period. The brief conceptual comments in the introduction (p. 12) admit that any strict understanding of civil war will not work, whether that is C.H. Lange’s definition as a war between citizens or what Romans meant when they used the phrase bellum civile or anything else. To fit the chronological range, Maschek is forced to flatten and broaden the concept. The Romans thought that their civil wars began in the 80s bce; Maschek, who is ‘interested in characterizing a much longer period that began in the 130s’ (p. 14), makes the whole late Republic a ‘civil war period’ (p. 16). The plurality of discrete episodes – Cicero recalled in 43 bce that there had been five civil wars so far (Cic. Phil. 8.8) – becomes a singular destructive force. Maschek is explicit: he writes about ‘not so much the Roman civil wars as the Roman civil war’ (p. 14; emphasis original).

This does little justice to the diversity of late Republican history. No one can doubt that Italy saw ‘massive internal violence’ (p. 14), but the intensity of the violence experienced, for example, in the Social War or Sulla’s campaign of 83–82 bce can hardly be considered mere ‘hot phases’ (p. 13) of a century-long process. The analytical difficulties introduced by this frame show up in Maschek’s discussion of the public construction boom in Italy. Maschek plots the numbers of monumental building projects in Rome, Latium, Campania and Samnium by decade from 170 to 50 bce and maps it onto an index of political instability by decade devised by P. Turchin and W. Scheidel (p. 223, Diagram 1). Maschek expects to find that public building became less frequent in times of high instability, and finds it ‘remarkable’ (pp. 222, 224) that the data does not show this. But it is simply a result of the conceptual tools being much too blunt. Even though there has been a shift from the paradigm of civil war to that of ‘political instability’, which, unlike the former, can at least hope to characterise the late second century bce, the decade as a chronological unit cannot capture the impact of Maschek’s theme on public building. On the one hand, much of the political instability behind Turchin and Scheidel’s index was too short-lived to have an appreciable effect on monumental building projects. Why would we expect the unrest in Rome associated with, for example, Tiberius Gracchus or Saturninus, to influence the construction of sanctuaries in Campania? On the other hand, no Roman civil war proper – which surely were disruptive enough to impact construction – lasted a full decade. The significance of this lies in the fact, duly noted by Maschek (p. 228), that civil war victors were prolific builders. In that period there is Lucius Opimius’ Temple of Concordia, Sulla’s reconstruction of the Capitolium (with the colossal columns of the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens: Plin. HN 36.45) and Caesar’s new Forum, to name just a few before Augustus’ marmorealisation of the entire city (Suet. Aug. 29). Nor was this a phenomenon confined to the late Republic, as even the most unobservant visitor to Rome can attest. It is enough to notice the arches of Constantine and Septimius Severus or Vespasian’s Colosseum. Against this background it is no surprise that decades of high instability, even civil war, do not show a dearth of building. Large-scale violence may well have suppressed building efforts, but one cannot see such a suppression over a comparison of decades if the victors of civil conflicts commemorated their victories in stone shortly after they had won them. Violence waxed and waned in the late Republic; and if we are to capture its effect on society, we need to account for its episodic nature. We lose the impact of civil war if we treat it as a century-long constant.

Of course, Maschek’s perspective is designed to be broad enough to use the archaeological record, which can resist precise dating (pp. 8–10). He deserves full credit for this effort, and the quibble above in no way diminishes its value. What is potentially a missed opportunity is that the union of archaeological and literary evidence has mostly pushed aside the numismatic. Maschek uses hoard data, but has much less to say about the images on the coins found in them. A. Meadows and J. Williams’s 2001 article (JRS 91) is conspicuously absent from the bibliography. Yet coinage, although beholden to the elite, Roman and male preoccupation of the moneyers, has much to say about many of Maschek’s themes, such as religious legitimisation, and, unlike other objects, can be dated with much greater confidence. The monumentality of late Republican coin types could perhaps have enriched the discussion of monumental public building.

Potter’s book is quite a different one. It is aimed at a much broader audience; testimonials on its dust jacket laud its readability and Potter’s ability to make complicated events accessible. Potter’s spin on the well-trodden path of Caesarian biography is to focus on two features (p. xix): a close reading of Caesar’s own words and an overarching study of Caesar’s leadership.

The study of leadership does not materialise as readers of the introduction might have expected. The book is not structured around leadership; it proceeds as a conventional, chronological biography, with relevant comments at times (pp. 119, 173, 257), yet without the focus initially advertised. There is plenty of explanatory material on the period before Caesar (pp. 1–18), what was happening in Rome while he was in Gaul (pp. 149–52) and even a digression on the differences between American and Roman slavery (p. 23), which suggests that Potter has placed a higher premium on accessibility than a detailed study of Caesar’s leadership. Potter accomplishes this goal stylishly. He covers a huge amount of ground at a compelling pace, with unpretentious diction (p. 95: ‘ass-covering move’), while still managing to evaluate the sources critically. Discussion of thornier problems is rightfully confined to manageable endnotes. There are a few mistakes: the Battle of the Colline Gate took place in 82 bce, not 81 (p. 39), and Caesar’s famous remark about the insubstantiality of the res publica was not made in a letter (p. 285). Yet the book is, on the whole, very accurate. It includes a helpful list of characters, a timeline and a glossary of terms, making it an ideal starting point for non-specialists interested in exploring Caesar’s life. Those readers will appreciate that it is an attractive, well-produced book, available at a reasonable price.

There will inevitably be disagreements when it comes to evaluating Caesar; and two features of Potter’s narrative have the potential to lead readers astray. The first is Potter’s heterodox view of Roman politics. The first page of text introduces Rome’s ‘democratic institutions’ (p. xvii), and shortly thereafter ‘Roman democracy’ (p. xx), without giving readers any sense of the extensive scholarly debate on this topic. Potter acknowledges a debt to F. Millar (pp. xx, 319), but it does not serve those new to Roman history to omit mention of how contentious some of Millar’s conclusions are. Nor are the workings of Republican politics examined in any detail, save for some comments in Chapter 1 and on pp. 53–4. One can understand this decision in the light of Potter’s focus on accessibility. It is easier for modern readers to understand Rome if it is treated as a democracy, rather than as a peculiar system that its inhabitants called the res publica. The same modernising phenomenon allows Milo to be described as a ‘supporter of right-wing causes’ (p. 226). Some historians may bristle at that language, but Potter’s approach is defensible, given his target audience. What is harder to reconcile is Potter simultaneously following the models of Roman politics offered by Millar and R. Syme (p. xx). As Millar eventually admitted, his approach did not just diverge from that of his former supervisor; it ‘runs directly counter to his’ (Millar, Rome, The Greek World, and the East. Volume I: The Roman Republic and the Augustan Revolution [2002], p. 12). Syme’s vision of the Republic was firmly oligarchic; the people had nothing like the influence on politics that Millar was prepared to grant them. Some of the prosopographical comments throughout Potter’s book, about family connections and elite alliances, sit uneasily with the idea that the people were in charge.

A second issue is Potter’s view of Caesar. In one sense, this follows from the presentation of Roman politics. Because we have not got to grips with Roman ‘democracy’, Caesar’s interaction with it is hard to parse. What Potter describes as ‘Caesar’s understanding of the democratic process’ (p. 97) is clearly not democratic: he wanted to make all decisions. And whereas Potter is open about Caesar’s authoritarian tendencies throughout the book (e.g. pp. 104, 126, 296), his treatment of the Republican system as self-evidently democratic makes it impossible to reconcile Caesar with that system, as T.P. Wiseman and R. Morstein-Marx have tried to do. Potter’s Caesar is no republican. Instead, he comes across as something like a contemporary ‘effective altruist’. In keeping with Potter’s stated aim, his Caesar is obsessed with ‘efficient leadership’ (p. 127); he ‘despised inefficiency’ (p. xix). This efficiency is all marshalled towards improving the lot of others. Potter’s Caesar is Mommsenian in his unwavering effort to ‘serve the interests of the Roman people’ (p. 261). He is said to have ‘presented himself as a man devoted to bettering the condition of the average person’ (p. xviii), and there is no suggestion in the book that Potter doubts his sincerity.

Could Caesar really have been so selfless? Potter is not shy about introducing Latin concepts throughout (p. 3: cursus honorum; p. 196: regnum); why do readers hear almost nothing about Caesar’s dignitas, which he claimed was dearer to him than life itself (Caes. BCiv. 1.9.2)? One can make the case that such a claim was tied up in Republican values and that it was not nearly as personalistic as it sounds (Morstein-Marx, ‘Dignitas and res publica: Caesar and Republican Legitimacy’, in: K.-J. Hölkeskamp [ed.], Eine politische Kultur (in) der Krise? Die “letzte Generation” der römischen Republik [2009]), but, nevertheless, it surely deserves mention in a discussion of Caesar’s motivations. There is also a slight tension in Potter’s account of Caesar’s leadership. Because of his focus on Caesar’s writings, there is naturally more to be said about Caesar in Gaul than Caesar as dictator. But Caesar’s most impactful legacy is his political leadership: that is why there were still ‘Kaisers’ and ‘Czars’ well into the twentieth century. Potter presents Caesar as a good leader (e.g. p. xviii), but this is clearly meant in a military sense. It is never reconciled with the string of poor decisions he made as dictator (pp. 280–8) that alienated many of his supporters and led to his assassination.

These books both make valuable contributions, even as they approach the same period in very different ways. Yet after reading them together, one wonders whether each could have been strengthened by paying more attention to the theme of the other. Potter, for example, has little to say about violence. What some have described as Caesar’s genocide (K. Raaflaub, ‘Caesar and Genocide: Confronting the Dark Side of Caesar’s Gallic Wars’, New England Classical Journal 48 [2021]) flows under the radar and strangely plays no role in explaining Gaul’s ongoing loyalty to Rome after Caesar (p. 193; contra Maschek, p. 109). Maschek, on the other hand, is disinclined to give much weight to elite competition when it comes to explaining shifts in the material culture of the late Republic (p. 291). One wonders whether he could have considered politics in more detail. His overarching conclusion seems to suggest gradual development over the long ‘civil war period’ and a sea change after the Battle of Actium (p. 292), when autocracy finally established itself for good. But the seeds of that political change were sown much earlier, and it is at least worth asking how that might have impacted Rome’s material culture. Civil war and autocracy are different topics, to be sure, but in the late Roman Republic they can be hard to extricate from each other.