Christian Reitzenstein-Ronning analyses the development of exile during the system change from Republic to Principate at the turn of the first millennium, in the print version of his Munich Habilitation thesis. R. aims to illuminate the epistemological chasm between the unregulated exile of the Middle Republic and the systematic jurisdiction of exile of the third century c.e. through discourse analysis. Thus, R. is interested in the narrative constitution of exiles, how exiles were seen, what ‘images’ of them circulated, and what space and agency were attributed to them. The method of discourse analysis, paired with postcolonial spatial theory and a meticulously systematic approach, allows the author to contribute significantly to the understanding of exile as both an integral and a specific part of Roman political culture.

The leitmotif of R.’s study is the double structure of exile and space, which were conceived conjointly in Ancient Rome. This pair likewise evolved together, which the author convincingly argues. R. breaks down the idea of development into normative and spatial development. As far as normative development is concerned, he retraces the ambiguities of delinquency and elite competition which resulted in the exiles of the Middle and Late Republic, contrasting the destructive political instrumentalisation of banishment with self-exile that was seen as protective both of the exiled individual and of the consensus of the political class and the system in general. Nevertheless, exile was gradually established over the final decades of the Republic as a lawful sanction for any criminal offence as a result and as a containment of the nobility’s eagerness to outperform itself. The right to self-exile and externally induced banishment thus coexisted as a hybrid form of ‘exile’, which was gradually mitigated and scaled in the first century c.e., with the introduction of the relegatio and deportatio, for example. This historic development, R. argues convincingly, went hand in hand with a discursive shift in the narrative from the vagrant figure of the exul vagus to the banished individual who was confined in a designated place.

In its spatial dimension, R. identifies a progressive geographical specification of exile that coincides with the shift in jurisdiction from the quaestiones to the senate and the princeps. Whereas exiles judged by a quaestio were generally free to choose the location of their banishment themselves, the senate and the princeps allocated specified locations in their rulings, reflected in the terminology of locus certus. R. introduces a subdivision of such loci certi into ‘nomic’ and ‘anomic’ places. A nomic place refers to a place that lies at a certain distance from the capital. It is typologically different from a polis, with a premeditated set of rules for the exile to follow and a corresponding density of standardised, controlled behaviour. This is reflected in Julia’s exile on the island of Pandateria, whose remoteness and difference to the proceedings of regular daily life became key elements in the discourse of exile. R. therefore refers to her banishment as a heterotopia, using Michel Foucault’s term. As opposed to the nomic location, an anomic location is a non-place or, with Homi J. Bhabha, a third space where the social conditions were described as fundamentally different from those of Rome, but the exile’s considerable material resources remained accessible to a degree. R.’s key example for this is Ovid’s banishment to Tomis. In the wake of fixing places of banishment, the discourse on exile split into an ideological perception of space, i.e. the empty space of exile, on the one hand, and the practical dimension of the more common realities of the relegated, as mirrored in the declamations, on the other. There is, however, no dedicated space for the homo sacer. One could kill the homo sacer with impunity within the Roman Empire, which is why R. draws a parallel between the discursive figures of the homo sacer and of the hostis, the enemy of the state, as reflected in the Late Republican sources.

The reality of exile is constituted of narratives. An exile is in a liminal state and place until they have been accepted into another citizenship or reintegrated into Roman citizenship. Thus, the discourse of exile is, in Roman literature, focused exclusively on the relationship between the exile and the capital, Rome. From the first century b.c.e., the conditions of a restitution in the present were negotiated by means of Rome’s myth-historical beginnings and legitimised through recurring references to banished figures from the past. These figures, such as Coriolanus or Camillus, were consequently defined and canonised as exemplary. R.’s detailed reflections on the discursive constitution of these figures as precedents make his study an important reference work, proving that the figure of the exile always oscillated between saviour and spectre.