These lines of Horace illustrate a key contention of C.'s study of the Roman plebs: the failure to acquire a personal fortune of 400,000 HS did not automatically condemn a Roman citizen to life as a disenfranchised, half-starved member of a deracinated Lumpenproletariat. This caricature of plebeian life is the result of the distorted elite lens through which we see the plebs in the ancient world's literary sources. C.'s tripartite study attempts to provide a more nuanced picture of the majority of Rome's citizens. In place of a desperate urban mob clamouring for bread and circuses, C. sees a stable core of moderately well-off businessmen, properly rooted in the city and connected to the world of Roman politics. One would not be mistaken to read this as a partial answer to Yavetz's call for a general history of the Roman people in his Plebs and Princeps (1969).

The first part of the book, ‘Plebeian Identity and Urban Culture’, lays the groundwork for C.'s ambitious study, establishing who the plebs were and how one might establish their cultural horizons (drawing on the culture studies of R. Hoggart, S. Hall, P. Bordieu and B. Lahire). Chapter 1 aims to remove one of the major obstacles to the idea that the plebs could have had a culture: the Urban Graveyard Effect. By focusing on the unusually good provision of food, water and other amenities enjoyed by the city of Rome, C. argues that the Roman plebs were protected from the traditional deprivations that made the pre-industrial metropolis so lethal for its non-elite inhabitants. The work of A. Sharlin, E. Lo Cascio and C. Virlouvet underpins this generally persuasive argument.

Given that the civic architecture that supported Rome's amenities allowed the plebs to put down roots and thrive, it should be no surprise that a distinctively plebeian culture can be best identified by looking at how the plebs interacted with the physical city. Using the data gathered by the Régionnaires (A. Chastagnol, J.–P. Guilhembert, D.W. Reynolds, G.R. Storey), Chapter 2 establishes that the plebs had a peculiarly close attachment to the specific part of the city in which they lived. This attachment, in fact, seems to have been strong enough to be passed from one generation to the next. Such a strong identification with a particular place, C. argues, will inevitably imbue that place with cultural significance. Having established that the plebs had the wherewithal to construct a culture of their own, Chapter 3 considers what that culture might have looked like. An analysis of plebeian funerary epigraphy from the city of Rome (neatly tabulated at pp. 212–31) reveals an emphasis on the world of waged labour. C.'s study of these monuments concludes that a distinctive culture of pride in honest work can be attributed to the Roman plebs.

The second part of the book comprises two chapters on ‘The Culture of the Plebs Media’. This section shows most clearly C.'s close engagement with the work of P. Veyne, expanding as it does upon a Plinian term employed by Veyne in his analysis of the middle classes in his L'empire gréco-romain (2005). Chapter 4 defines C.'s use of the expression to describe the upper elite of the plebs – a group just below the Ordines that self-consciously strove to differentiate itself from the rest of the mass of Roman citizens. C. claims that the term plebs media represents a middle point between the plebs infima (something like the Lumpenproletariat of the popular imagination) and the plebs summa (the senators and equites). Chapter 5 is an investigation of the ideology of this middling class. C. sees the plebs media as having a mode of self-representation that distinguishes them both from similar economic groups outside Italy and from other sub-elite groups within the city. To assert their special identity, this elite of the plebs sought to mimic the representative strategies of the senatorial and equestrian orders (e.g. by imitating a cursus honorum when describing their careers). The chapter concludes with what C. suggests might be specific and original to the culture of the plebs media: the Totenmahl (funerary banquet). The force of the arguments in this section is somewhat blunted by C.'s insistence on analysing the phenomenon of an elite core through the specific term plebs media. It is difficult to shake the feeling that C. grants this phrase a greater importance than it is due, and it is a shame to think that other avenues for exploring this phenomenon may have been neglected in order to pursue what may well be a sociological shibboleth.

If the second part of C.'s book disappoints slightly, the third is considerably more successful. The reader is presented with two detailed studies of plebeian political culture at Rome from the Gracchi to Domitian. This section attempts to prove the theory that the self-conscious, stable and relatively well-off plebeian body described in the first part should be in possession of political horizons that extend beyond the Juvenalian clamour for bread and circuses. Chapter 6 takes the story from the Gracchi to the Triumvirate and explores the phenomenon of civic integration, collective behaviour and political initiative on the part of the plebs in the Roman Republic. This chapter places itself firmly in the midst of Millar and Mouritsen's debate on the level of popular engagement in Roman politics. C. focuses upon the evidence for plebeian interest in the comitia and contiones (with a detailed discussion of imperialism at pp. 464–97), how the plebs engaged in political activity and what collective memory they had of these interventions. C. concludes that Rome housed a highly-politicised plebs who had faith in the workings of the various recognised channels for their desires and discontents.

Chapter 7 continues the story of plebeian political engagement up to the death of Domitian. C. notes that the plebs' drift away from the traditional channels of Republican politics (while real) does not, in fact, entail any sort of depoliticisation. He highlights instead the advantages provided by the plebs' new-found ability to confront the princeps face-to-face, as opposed to the mediated access to power they enjoyed in the Republic. Central to this argument is the development of the emperor's role as paterfamilias to Rome (explored in detail at pp. 697–735). Although C. does not shy away from confronting the grave problems presented by the evidence for plebeian activity in early imperial Rome, the difference between those sources and the ones from the late Republic makes the join between Chapters 6 and 7 potentially less clean than C. makes it appear.

C. ultimately makes a strong argument in favour of the wealthy and stable core of the Roman plebs having a strong sense of their own specific identity and political place in society (even as that society changed with the rise of the Principate). Questions may remain as to the precise size of that group, and even how ‘urban’ they ought to be considered (is it, for example, the departure of this group for the harvest that put Tiberius Gracchus' tribunate on a downward slope?). This remains, however, a tightly argued and well-presented thesis.

The book's strongest card is its Annèxe: a database of all instances of plebeian political action from 133 b.c.–a.d. 96, categorised by place, objective, type, spontaneity, success, etc. This dossier should make C.'s book an invaluable resource for anyone studying the politics of the city of Rome in the late Republic and early Principate. One final note: one hesitates to comment on prose written in a language not one's own, but this reviewer did note an unhelpful tendency on C.'s part to slip into unfamiliar acronyms; many a pause in a long read was occasioned by the need to remember, for example, what meaning might be encoded within ‘l’UGE’ (eventually parsed as Urban Graveyard Effect). An attentive reader should be able to tease these out, but any scholar casually dipping into the book on the back of a reference may find themselves en ruisseau sans pagaie.