This volume presents the results of a major research project with the same title, directed by the editors of the book and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the UK. The project aimed to collect the full range of sculptural, epigraphic and textual evidence relevant to the creation and use of honorific portrait statues of the late Roman period, from 284 (accession of Diocletian) to 620 a.d., the date of the last attested case. This entailed the collection of a vast database, comprising some 870 items of statuary, 1,630 inscriptions and 200 literary references. Freely available online (http://laststatues.classics.ox.ac.uk/) and fully searchable, this monumental effort will surely shape and enrich studies of late-antique portrait statuary for years to come.

S.’s and W.-P.’s book results from a conference in which the editors and other members of their research team participated, along with a series of leading experts in late-antique portraiture who had collaborated with the project in one way or another, all finally coming together to make use of the new database to address the key research problems which had animated the project: what was distinctive about the character of portrait statuary and its uses in Late Antiquity and how can we explain the slow disappearance of honorific statuary from the urban landscapes of the late Roman Empire?

The book is sensibly organised in order both to give a survey of the evidence collected in the database and to address the core research questions from a number of angles and at a variety of different levels of resolution. Introductory chapters by the two editors give broad overviews of the data. S. discusses both the reuse of earlier portraits alongside new dedications, and the continuing richness of the statue landscape which this entailed, against the image of decline suggested by the reduced numbers of new portraits. He also addresses some of the distinctive stylistic and technical features of late-antique portraiture, such as emphatic irises and deeply drilled pupils. He criticises the old emphasis on increasing spirituality in favour of an account framed in terms of a desire to update and enliven images, and a claim on the part of those portrayed to be able ‘to see more and further than others’, though in terms specific to their common roles, whether governors seeing ‘wrong doing’, local notables seeing ‘the common good’ or holy men seeing god (p. 24). W.-P. discusses the evidence of statue bases, pointing out the marked regional variation in the statue habit, and in its transformation, in the three centuries with which the project was concerned: Rome and southern Italy (not so much the north), the Aegean and provinces bordering it, and central north Africa being centres in which the statue habit was most lively, the northern provinces of the empire, and those of the old Near East, showing relatively limited interest in the practice. By comparison with the period of the high empire, in which local civic notables were the primary recipients of portrait honours, in Late Antiquity emperors, governors and other imperial office holders dominate the record.

These two overviews are followed by a series of chapters (3–9) discussing specific provinces or groups of provinces, in order to explore in more depth what might lie behind the broad patterns of regional variation already identified by W.-P. These chapters vary in quality, but those of C. Machado (on Italy), G. de Bruyn and Machado (on North Africa), and U. Gehn (on the Greek mainland and islands) offer particularly sharp accounts of the internal variations in the statue habits of those regions, and the specific political, social and historical factors which might be affecting them. Chapters 10–17 take the focus down another level to individual cities with particularly intensive or in some other way unusual statue habits: Rome, Constantinople, Aphrodisias, Ephesus, Corinth, Athens, Lepcis Magna and Gortyna. Here again the work of Machado on Rome is particularly interesting. In other chapters one might wish that the editors had taken a stronger line in encouraging the contributors to address the core project questions, rather than pursuing somewhat tangential hobby-horses, such as the details of design of statue bases in the chapter on Ephesus.

Chapters 18–23 focus on issues of chronology, honorands and style. They comprise a rag-bag of essays rather loosely focused on the core questions, or even the materials, of the project. One summarises some key findings of an Oxford Ph.D. on third-century imperial statues. Three others consist largely of research already available in German dissertations and monographs, published in the period 1998–2014, on portrait styles (the end of the Zeitgesicht and the differentiation between the imperial visage and that of his subjects), female portrait iconography (rather little on statues) and portrait honours for provincial governors and imperial bureaucracy office holders. Their findings do not seem to be substantially advanced by virtue of the Last Statues of Antiquity database.

The final chapter, by W.-P., seeks to pull together the threads of the arguments of the volume in addressing the core questions concerning the transformation and ultimate disappearance of the institution of honorific portrait statuary in Late Antiquity. W.-P. does a good job of drawing out and evaluating some of the lines of argument adumbrated in earlier chapters – changing character of imperial rulership, possible impact of Christianity and so on. He rightly emphasises that honorific portraiture was not an essential concomitant of urban life in the Roman empire: plenty of cities – especially in the Levant, Egypt and north-west Europe – managed perfectly well without it, and the disappearance of statuary cannot be equated with the decline of cities. Rather, the statue habit was tied to a ‘particular style of urban life, civic and (in Rome) senatorial’ (p. 303), which survived most strongly in the lands around the Aegean, where these civic ideals had originally been born. Unfortunately, exactly what social, cultural or political factors may have served to anchor such ideals and the statue habit or which, when cut away, would lead to their decline, is never made clear. In part, this is a result of a significant oversight in the design of the research project. As W.-P. points out, ‘much of the decline predated 284, the date selected for the start of our project’ (p. 295). This problem is identified in a number of chapters (cf. pp. 73, 80, 87 on Gaul and Spain, Danube provinces, Greek mainland). It perhaps also lies behind the sometimes somewhat circular explanations we are offered for cases where the statue habit is particularly long lived, for example in Lepcis Magna where, we are told, the ‘exceptional survival’ of ‘the habit of honouring local notables with statues … can be explained by the strong conservatism of the Lepcitan elite’ (p. 204).

The underlying problem here is perhaps one of a tension of mission between that of the social historian and that of the old-fashioned classical archaeologist, concerned for the exhaustive collection and cataloguing of a particular category of material. The effort to achieve a total collection of all the relevant material data (statuary and inscriptions) seems animated by an illusion of objectivity guaranteed by completeness. The explanatory goals of the project might have been better served by an intelligent sampling of the material, selecting key provinces and key cities, in order to be able to explore changing patterns in the statue habit in relation to key explanatory variables over a much longer period of time, not least reaching back into the high empire when the transformations with which the project was concerned were already underway. This might also have permitted a much more nuanced analysis of exactly how changes in the statue habit intersected with changing patterns of social stratification, political organisation and civic life. Although these factors crop up in every chapter, the structure of the book – with province by province and city by city reporting of the data – leads to quite a lot of repetition, without much development, by comparison with, for example, J. Ma's handling of similar issues in the Hellenistic period in his Statues and Cities (2014). Such an approach, however, would not have produced the wonderful online catalogue, which is perhaps the most significant contribution of the Last Statues project: this will be of lasting value to anyone with an interest in the history and the art of Late Antiquity, and sets new standards for the publication and sharing of usable research data in classical archaeology for the digital generation.