Roman contributions to political thought have undergone substantial re-evaluation in recent years. No longer simply folded into a republican discourse of virtue nor treated as the predictable villain of liberalism, Roman political thought is now being recognised as more complicated, nuanced, self-conscious and innovative. In this volume C. continues the conversation she helped stimulate in The State of Speech, using the republican tradition ‘to explore Roman republicanism in an idiom that could more effectively blend the methods and goals of political theory with those of classical studies' (p. xv). C. looks to the Romans not to construct ideas of civic virtue but to explore how the Romans ‘grasp[ed] the action around them, and the complex processes involved in making the judgments we make as citizens, all of which together involve reason, imagination, acknowledgment (specifically the acknowledgment of limits), sensation, memory, and the emotions, especially hope and despair’ (p. 4).

Responding to the view that the Romans have little to say to modern politics, C. argues that it is precisely the contradictions of Roman political life, including their dedication ‘to liberty and to the reverent preservation of social and economic hierarchies, to popular consent and elite authority, to persuasive eloquence and strict limits on popular deliberation’, by which the Romans ‘hold up a mirror to our political weak spots and our deepest sources of silent social discomfort’ (p. 17). Each chapter reads as a theoretical incursion into Roman politics that reflected on its own contradictions.

In Chapter 1, C. seeks to reframe how we think about liberty and concord by examining what Cicero's ‘account of both reveals about the condition of a republican politics' (p. 26). Liberty is premised not on consensus, as it has come to be understood in neo-Roman interpretations, but in ‘the division of the community into parts’ (p. 33) in which concord appears as a ‘momentary goal in a liquid narrative of power shifts and flows, rather than a static condition’ (p. 46). The politics that emerges is of ‘contested representation’ rather than the aggregation of ‘authority and legitimacy in a single site’ (pp. 55, 57). It is a politics that provides the conditions of what C. refers to as ‘resistibility’ and ‘novelty’: the ability ‘to preserve not just the condition of potential disagreement or dissent, but discernible entry-points into disagreement, sites in which dissenting citizens can not only stand but push back and create new ways of thinking and doing politics’ (p. 26).

In Chapter 2, C. takes up the problems of justice in politics, addressing the question (by way of Sallust) of the relationship between vividness (the ‘sensual immersion in a morally and socially complex world’ [p. 79]) and judgement. What C. highlights is how Sallust foregrounds aspects of the disparity ‘between intention and action, between being and doing’ that encompasses everything from corruption to inequality (p. 101). Sallust highlights the ‘structural violence’ of republican politics that reveals (as it breaks down) a notion of citizenship as more than legal status: it is a psychological state in which citizens rely on ‘mutual regard’ to give them ‘a sense of belonging in the civic body’ (p. 102).

C. argues against interpretations of Sallust (and other Roman historians) that focus on well-defined ideological ends of Roman life. The ‘reluctance’ of Jugurtha ‘to end its own story’ captures, for C., the ‘interrogative, self-critical ethos’ of Sallust's thought (p. 112). ‘Reading Sallust means, among other things, encountering a model for political thought marked by a strong sense of what phenomena deserve to be matters of concern for citizens: political access and process rather than ends, material inequity, embodied experience, awareness of the play of chance’ (p. 112). Sallust invites a way of thinking: attending to ‘the structural violence of political life’; investigating the gaps ‘between being and doing’; exploring ‘the sensations of collective experience’; and analysing who speaks and who listens (p. 113).

C. next addresses the nature of the free self by way of Horace, drawing on current discussions in political theory about the non-sovereign self. C.'s point of departure is the Greek philosophical tradition that emphasised the freely knowing, judging and choosing subject. For C., Horace ‘counters the equation of judgment and self-sovereignty’ with ‘another vision, one in which trust in the self-knowledge that supports judgment is a delicate and dangerous aspiration, and judgment is recognized as a potentially violent act that reinforces patterns of vice’ (p. 123).

In Chapter 4, C. examines the ethos of Cicero's orator, arguing that it is based on a notion of political contest (that is mirrored in contestation within the self). For C., this provides an important contribution to political thought by providing a model of thinking and accounting for different perspectives in forming judgements and making demands, scrutinising and checking ‘the gritty processes of political action’ (p. 171).

C. explores the idea of the political imagination by way of Cicero's Pro Marcello in Chapter 5. She highlights how, by way of generating affective reactions through the text, Cicero creates a collective aesthesis meant to prompt the senators to imagine what sort of men they imagine themselves to be in the new atmosphere, establish the terms of collective action, acknowledge limits and contingency, and explore the nature of sovereignty. In this panegyric that is neither completely sincere nor insincere, Cicero ‘loosens the hold on us of the world we desire, by calling attention to the ways our own unrecognized or unacknowledged fictions structure that world’ (p. 194). Cicero's oration, like much of what C. argues about Roman political thought, is an argument for how speech ‘preserves a space, not quite of resistance, but for resistibility’ (p. 200).

One of the joys of C.'s writing is its effortlessness as she weaves literary and artistic images with the theoretical perspectives of (among others) Arendt, Levinas, Ricoeur, Dewey and Rancière, all serving as ways of thinking about the Roman experience of politics. The Romans offer us an approach to political thought that is not confined to philosophy but opens up to include history, poetry, oratory and satire. These different forms of writing mirror the Roman conception of politics ‘as the constant, contested formation and undoing of consensus' that defies formalisation (p. 207). These texts are ‘practices of knowing the world’ (p. 208) that do not reduce to platitudes but engage us in techniques of reading that overlap with how we can make sense of the world. C.'s reading is simultaneously about the Romans and us as we confront (or should confront) the psychological foundation of citizenship, the dynamics of change, the limits of judgement and the sense that failure is possible.