In the past, the topic of exile in Greco-Roman antiquity has been approached mostly from a legal or literary perspective. Far less attention has been paid to ‘practical’ questions such as the frequency of banishments and recalls, the selection of places, or the social and economic side of exile. For the Roman Republic, G.P. Kelly has recently addressed some of these neglected questions (A History of Exile in the Roman Republic [2006]), but for the time from Caesar's death to the end of the Roman Empire, no such treatment exists. Hence, this volume, which concentrates on the geographical, social and political aspects of exile during the principate, is a priori a most welcome contribution.
The book is a revised and extended version of S.'s Ph.D. thesis, submitted at the University of Stuttgart in 2007. Its backbone is an alphabetical catalogue of 250 persons who were banished between 44 b.c. and Carinus' death in a.d. 285. The list follows the conventions of PIR 2 and includes references to the relevant primary texts and the most important pieces of secondary literature. As S. acknowledges, it is incomplete, because it is primarily based on electronic searches of the surviving literary texts; epigraphic and papyrological sources are occasionally cited, but have not been searched systematically. Despite this drawback, S.'s collection of 250 imperial exiles is a remarkable achievement (cf. e.g. the 64 republican exiles listed in Kelly, op. cit., pp. 161–219) and provides a solid basis for S.'s analysis and future research. There are two useful shorter catalogues which list the banishments by geographical location and in chronological order.
The prosopographical material is preceded by an analytical part. Starting with an inscription from Pompeii (CIL 4.4788), S. swiftly introduces the reader to the topic of exile (Chapter 1) and gives a survey of previous research (Chapter 2). These pages reflect S.'s extensive reading of the primary and secondary literature and give a good orientation on the status quaestionis.
In Chapter 3, S. sketches the evolution of exile as a punishment from the late Republic to the principate. His treatment is not intended as an original contribution to the study of Roman legal history, but primarily prepares the ground for the following chapters. S. gives a lucid account of the different types of banishment and plausibly argues that exile became a popular form of punishment partly because of the judicial reforms of the early principate: the static relation of crime and punishment during the Republic was replaced by a more flexible judicative system, which allowed for wide discretion and in which various types of exile functioned as an alternative to the death penalty. Based on his prosopographical catalogue, S. rejects the view that exile was primarily a punishment for the honestiores.
The idea that exile was a particularly flexible form of punishment and thus well-suited for the imperial courts is further explored in Chapters 4–7, which contain a detailed analysis of the prosopographical evidence. S. first approaches exile from a strictly quantitative perspective and then discusses the evidence for several groups of exiles (relatives of the emperor, political enemies, magistrates, astrologists, philosophers, actors, peregrini, delatores). Next he examines the motives and considerations of the banishers and the factors that determined where a person would have to spend his or her exile.
S. rightly emphasises that our sources are fragmentary and often biased and that references to the expulsion of astrologers, philosophers and other groups are difficult to quantify. Consequently, a statistical evaluation would have no validity. Nevertheless, S.'s look at the numbers proves illuminating. As he observes, the 250 named exiles of his prosopographical catalogue are only the tip of the iceberg and show that exile must have been a much more widespread phenomenon than is usually thought. Tacitus' words plenum exiliis mare may be exaggerated, but they also contain a great deal of truth.
As regards the relation between social status, profession, place and circumstances of exile, and the chances of being recalled, S. discerns several patterns. Relatives of the emperor were mostly banished to islands off the coast of Italy; they were always placed under military guard, isolated from the public in one of the emperor's private estates, and had the least chance of returning to Rome. Former client kings such as Archelaus Herodes were also guarded by soldiers, but they were usually held in cities with military garrisons. The remaining crowd of less influential or prominent exiles generally stood much better chances of returning home one day and were less closely watched: either they were simply expelled from an area, or they were assigned a particular place and their surveillance was handed to the local authorities. S. convincingly argues that the emperors consciously used the wide spectrum of possible destinations to adjust the punishment to the respective person: major cities and towns on the continent were regarded as mild forms of exile; islands, especially tiny ones such as Seriphus or Gyarus, were a harsher punishment. Hence, the common assumption that people were banished to islands because it was more difficult to escape from them has to be discarded.
As S. shows by numerous examples, banishment was not a final verdict, but a sort of probation. The emperor could display his clementia by recalling exiles or sending them to a more agreeable place, but he could also stiffen the punishment: exiles who continued to pose a threat or disturb the public order were moved to less favourable places or simply executed. Appeals to the emperor seem to have had little effect and amnesties were usually brought about by political changes at Rome.
S.'s interpretation of the sources is generally cautious and circumspect. However, it should be pointed out that Ovid's catalogue of places of exile in Pont. 1.3 is not a reflection of the imperial taxonomy of places of exile which S. has uncovered (pp. 193–5), but an entertaining reversal of similar catalogues of exempla in philosophical consolations of exile; also, this philosophical tradition is neither distinctly stoic (p. 199) nor a characteristic feature of imperial literature (p. 61 n. 32), but can be traced back to the Cynic philosopher Teles in the third century b.c. Furthermore, S.'s discussion of the attractiveness of different places of exile concentrates too much on social and cultural factors (cf. e.g. p. 202); climate, landscape and cuisine (cf. Cass. Dio 40.54.3) were, however, just as important.
A more serious weakness is the arrangement of the material. The structure chosen by S. leads to many repetitions (e.g. the banishment and execution of exiled relatives is discussed twice, pp. 75–6, 166–7). Moreover, many important insights do not receive the prominence they deserve. S.'s observations about the treatment of exile in the Roman historians, satirists and Pliny the Younger (pp. 80–1, 83–4, 85–6, 152, 159, 161; cf. also pp. 56, 63, 167–8, etc.), his remarks about the political symbolism of amnesties and recalls (pp. 145–6, 148–9, etc.), and his material on everyday life in exile and the social interaction between persons who were banished to the same place (pp. 93, 181, 190, etc.) are instructive and thought-provoking, but scattered and can be accessed only through the four indexes (persons, places, things, passages discussed) or by reading the book cover to cover.
S. has produced a rich and thorough investigation, which not only advances our knowledge of the geographical, social and economic side of exile, but also sheds new light on some of its legal aspects and puts the literary reflections of exile into a new perspective.
