The Old Testament story of Naboth (1 Kings 21) is that of an innocent smallholder unjustly executed by the wicked rulers Ahab and Jezebel for the sake of expropriating his paltry plot of land. This rather obscure episode is part of the ongoing struggle between Ahab and the Jewish prophets, in which the king emerges as a weak but well-meaning figure, too easily influenced by the wicked Jezebel, but honest enough to show some remorse. Naboth himself remains mostly offstage, but his brief and unfortunate brush with the authorities offered Ambrose of Milan the opportunity for a short, sharp treatise on poverty and wealth. His De Nabuthae historia thus reaches us as something between a sermon and a pamphlet, patiently interpreting the story of Naboth and drawing out its lessons for his contemporary audience. P.'s edition provides a text – that established by Schenkl in the CSEL series, and revised by F. Gori in 1985 – with Italian translation, plus an introduction and an extensive commentary. Text and translation together occupy less than 50 pages, and so the chief focus of the book is the commentary, which proceeds paragraph by paragraph, picking out in each case a central idea, elucidating the argument, and offering verbal and conceptual parallels with Scripture, classical authors and Ambrose's Christian contemporaries – above all, his model Basil of Caesarea.

There is plenty in the story of Naboth – not least its transparent unfairness – which evidently resonated for Ambrose and still does today. Certainly Ambrose had no hesitation in giving the story contemporary relevance: every day, he begins, another Ahab is born, another Naboth is cast out and killed (De Nab. 1.1). From this arresting opening he goes on to articulate a vision of the rich as offenders against the natural order, in which all humanity is born equal, naked and hungry. The rhetoric is undeniably striking, although P. rightly notes that its radicalism can be overstated: Ambrose, like Paulinus of Nola, concludes that wealth is not wrong in itself, and advocates Christian charity – not as a path to perfection but as the simple duty of all who have more than their neighbours. Similarly, we should be cautious in drawing on Ambrose for accurate details of late-antique conditions. His illustrations are often borrowed from Basil, and his rhetoric trades inevitably in types, not to say stereotypes: the rich man is in his castle, and the poor man at his gate, but even though we recognise them in church we do not expect to meet them when we emerge. Here P. could have engaged more with recent Anglophone scholarship: the bibliography lacks anything by P. Brown, R. Finn or P. Garnsey, to mention only three scholars who have discussed the De Nabuthae and Ambrose's attitude to wealth. In the end, of course, none of this diminishes the force and value of Ambrose's indictment of the acquisitive rich. It remains a fascinating text, and P. is a thorough and reliable guide.