Amidst increasing interest in the representation of the Severan dynasty, Adam Kemezis provides an appealing model of interaction between centrally propagated narratives of power and literary reactions to them. K.'s thesis is deceptively simple. After the death of Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Empire saw a number of rapid shifts in the rhetoric of imperial authority as the continuity of the Aurelian régime transformed into the sometimes chaotic upheaval of the early third century. The failure to create a ‘consensus ideology’ led to a cultural atmosphere in which — in marked contrast to the Antonine age — it became possible, and indeed natural, openly to disagree with the ‘constantly changing dynastic propaganda’ (6) and to create ‘narrative worlds’ (11–14) operating in direct competition.

The volume is divided into four main sections. K. opens with a chronological overview of the changing Severan narrative of dynastic legitimacy. Though this is very much an effort to set a scene, K. shows great skill in creating a coherent narrative of his own which summarizes and builds on recent investigations into Severan representation. Nor does he shy away from those moments which have proved more problematic to fit into coherent models of the third century. K.'s placement of the constitutio Antoniniana within a narrative of imperial renewal may not be entirely original (30–4), but through comparison with Dio's account he sets up a sound basis on which to construct a set of competing and contradictory narratives.

The bulk of discussion is focused on the three titular authors, who are given roughly equal treatment. K.'s Dio is a familiar figure, a senator bemoaning the increasing impotence of the Senate during the decay of the Severan age. K. takes a holistic approach to Dio's history, viewing it as a discussion of the changing nature of Romanness through the four main periods of early and late Republic, Principate, and Dio's own ‘age of iron and rust’ (72.36.4). For K., Dio's narrative attempts to reclaim senatorial authority over the Roman past in reaction to incursive Severan narratives. Even Dio's Augustus ‘is presented in terms of his management of and accommodation with a senatorial elite that remains for Dio the defining essence of the Roman state’ (148). Philostratus receives two connected chapters on the Apollonius and the Sophists. Again, K. takes these two very different texts as part of a single reaction to Severan narratives, but one which is less explicit in its conclusion than Dio's. Philostratus is seen as deliberately creating a number of complex and sometimes incompatible narratives of the interaction between Greek culture and the Roman Empire, producing ‘a greatly expanded matrix of pasts and presents’ (226) in which the continuity of Greek culture is not always easily found. Herodian completes the group, and is offered as the most pessimistic of the three. K. reads his narrative as one in which all the expectations of traditional rhetoric are subsumed by a ‘dysfunctional Rome’ (227–72) in the aftermath of Marcus Aurelius' death. Herodian meanwhile comes through as an agent of traditional cultural authority, staying within literary expectations to provide an element of control in the chaos he describes: ‘he shows an Antonine author can still describe it, and thereby make his audience Antonine’ (272).

This volume is by no means an introduction to any of these authors, and neither are the individual discussions likely to prove immediately accessible to readers without good prior knowledge of the texts in question. Indeed there are numerous occasions when a solid background in K.'s own work, particularly on Lucian and Antonine literature, is necessary fully to appreciate his point. Underlying much of K.'s argument is his work on the lack of contemporary historiography under the Antonines (AJPhil. 131 (2010), 285–325), while his openly somewhat heterodox take on Philostratus is similarly grounded in previous discussion (P. Fleury and T. Schmidt (eds), Perceptions of the Second Sophistic and its Times (2011), 3–22; Cl. Ant. 34 (2014), 61–101). But there are exceptions to this rule. K. offers a brief but comprehensive appendix for each author, primarily dealing with questions of the dating of their texts, but also extending into the broader debates surrounding their ancient context. In Herodian's case in particular, where literary debate is very much dominated by German scholarship, K.'s summary of the questions regarding his authorial persona (real or otherwise) is an excellent addition to Anglophone discussion.

It is, however, in its overall scheme that K.'s volume makes its most valuable contribution to study of the Severan era. In stressing the importance of narrative to both the emperors themselves and the authors who reacted to it, K. provides a useful companion to the more structural approach which has come to dominate recent histories of the third century. K.'s volume serves as a sharp reminder of the rhetorical goals at play in any understanding of a period which can sometimes appear rather well served with primary material compared to the murkier decades which follow. On its own, K.'s chapter on the development of competing central narratives would be a useful summary of the considerable work which has gone into investigating Severan representations of their power. By emphasizing the potential impact of this changing story on the process of ‘imagining in narrative form the relationship of past and present’ (277), however, K. provides an additional and highly attractive level of sophistication to the process of reconstructing third-century developments from their complex source material.