This thought-provoking book carefully analyses ‘the rise of deification’ as a significant political and intellectual development in late Republican culture and ‘a religious change arguably among the most important at Rome before the spread of Christianity’ (p. 10). Focusing specifically on the agency of Cicero in this process, whose ideas on divinity and religion C. argues had significant ‘normative power’ in this period, C. aims ‘to present a case study on the dynamics of religious change at Rome by exploring vestiges of an inventive process that variously formulated, cross-examined, and naturalized a contested concept’ (p. 11).

With respect to the possibility for human beings to attain to divinity, C. sees Cicero as a radically innovative and experimental thinker, not just in the philosophical treatises produced in the last decade of his life, but from the very beginning of his rhetorical and political career. In his view, Cicero was the key point of reception at Rome for Hellenistic ideas and practices of deification, which had previously made little impact outside of the Greek-speaking world. Thus C. comes to the opposite conclusion of M.H. Griffin 80 years ago, who understood Cicero's rhetoric of divinity in his praise of Pompey as reflecting ‘a generally prevailing mood of acceptance among Roman citizens’ of such ideas and suggesting ‘that Cicero assumed in his audience a tacit recognition’ of the potential for the blurring of the boundaries between the divine and the human in the achievements of extraordinary Romans (M.H. Griffin, ‘Deification and Cicero's De lege Manilia’ CW 27 [1934], 181–2; this note is not included in C.’s bibliography). According to C., Cicero rather had to ‘walk a tightrope’ (p. 34), cautiously introducing for the first time to the Roman people concepts of divine favour and immanent divinity and in the process articulating a novel symbolic vocabulary. C.’s analysis draws attention to the various ways in which Cicero's experimentation with concepts of divine assimilation broadened the possibilities of what was sayable in late Republican discourse. He draws interestingly on recent work in metaphor theory (e.g. Lakoff) in understanding metaphor as serving ‘to set cultural priorities and shape perspectives’, possessing ‘cognitive agency’ and ‘capable of subtly affecting conceptual distinctions between mortals and immortals at Rome’ (p. 13). Especially when placed in conversation with the ‘market model’ of late Republican Roman religion (e.g. A. Bendlin, ‘Looking beyond the Civic Compromise: Religious Pluralism in Late Republican Rome’, in E. Bispham and C. Smith [2000], pp. 115–35), this is a useful new approach to Cicero's ‘initiatives' and ‘interventions’ in the discourse (pp. 16–17).

After the brief introduction (pp. 1–17) – which presents the theoretical concepts and frameworks that retreat, for the most part, into the background in the rest of the book in favour of close textual analysis – C. traces the diachronic development of ideas of deification through the Ciceronian corpus in the following four chapters. The ‘cultural work of metaphor’ in the early speeches – especially in the De lege Manilia of 66 b.c.e., ‘the most direct and literal claim of Pompey's divinity in these years’ (p. 35) – is the principal subject of the first chapter (pp. 18–62).Footnote ¹ C. identifies a number of key metaphors, which in later chapters he demonstrates to be abiding concerns in Cicero's conceptualisation of deification in the philosophical works: ideas of salvation, luck, (re)foundation, arrival and attributions of divine qualities or inspiration. While the analysis offers a number of insights, especially with respect to contemporary practices in the Greek East, the lexicographical arguments for Cicero's originality with respect to previous Roman political discourse tend, as is almost inevitable, to be made from silence. The claim, for example, that ‘[i]n extant Latin, Cicero introduces divinus into political oratory’ (p. 39) has potentially interesting implications, but the initial qualifier is an important one, given the loss of the works of all Cicero's predecessors in the genre, and somewhat limits the conclusions that can be drawn.

These early speeches are situated in only a rather narrow discussion of the historical context, confined primarily to Greek divinisation in Sicily (pp. 18–26). Even if one accepts C.’s arguments for the circumscribed effects of the divine honours bestowed on earlier figures like Marcellus and Flamininus or of Ennius' ideas on apotheosis, metempsychosis and Euhemerism before his reception and rearticulation by Cicero, the history of deification and divine assimilation at Rome before 66 b.c.e. is more complex than the picture painted here, and merits a fuller discussion if we are to understand just how innovative and normative Cicero was. Scipio Africanus had actively encouraged the belief that he enjoyed divine favour and inspiration, and perhaps even a divine origin (Livy 26.19; Polybius 10.2); after his death, his imago hung in the Capitoline temple. More conspicuously absent from C.’s discussion is the popular posthumous cult of the Gracchi, to whom sacrifices were made and whose statues were frequented ‘just like shrines of the gods’ (Plutarch, C. Gracchus 18). For Cicero, the Gracchi must have been a problematic precedent for the posthumous deification of exceptional Romans. While C. rightly emphasises that Cicero and his language are part of a dialectical relationship, both reflective of the social context as well as instrumental in transforming social norms, that context is at times underappreciated: Cicero's supposed ‘theory of immortality’ articulated in the Pro Rabirio (p. 51), for example, does not seem particularly innovative when viewed against the broader memory culture of the Republic, especially among the aristocratic gentes.

With the second chapter (pp. 63–110), C. turns to the post-exilic works. First the ‘cross-domain mapping’ of metaphor is traced especially in the two orations Post reditum and the De domo sua. C. shows how Cicero exploits the occasion to further explore the possibilities of deification, presenting his own return to Rome as a kind of apotheosis and ‘divinizing’ those agents instrumental in his recall, especially the consul (and ‘deus’) Lentulus. Building on Cicero's arguments for the possibility of an afterlife for those Romans who serve the Republic in the Pro Sestio, which ‘contains one of the fullest explications of Cicero's political agenda and also an expanded, provocative presentation of his religious ideas' (p. 80), the final section of the chapter – one of the finest parts of the book – crosses over to the De re publica and De legibus, in which Cicero elaborates most systematically his ideas on meritorious apotheosis.

Chapter 3 (pp. 111–48) moves on to the crisis of the Republic that overshadows the Caesarian speeches and the Tusculan Disputations. C.’s analysis of the Pro Marcello (pp. 112–26) is particularly compelling in offering a nuanced interpretation that mediates between the poles of previous scholarly opinion, which tend to be either embarrassed apologies for Cicero's panegyric of Caesar or radically subversive readings that see the speech as a call for the dictator's assassination. C. shows how the promise of ‘deferred deification’ in the speech serves a protreptic function, obliging Caesar to continue to exercise his clementia and ultimately to restore the institutions of the Republic if he is to attain divine honours, and then only after his death. The fourth and final chapter (pp. 149–84) treats the later dialogues and the Philippics. The problems of ambivalence in the De natura deorum are handled well (cf. M. Beard, ‘Cicero and Divination: the Formation of a Latin Discourse’, JRS 76 [1986], 33–46), as is the difficult task of making sense out of Cicero's inconsistent and constantly shifting public attitudes on deification in the wake of Caesar's assassination. But the real achievement here is the masterful way in which C. weaves together the De re publica, the De senectute and the De amicitia into a coherent ‘sequence’. He illuminates the retrojection of the beliefs on immortality into the deep Republican past in the De senectute, and the consequences of the arguments of Laelius in the De amicitia that belief in the impermanence of the soul is actually the novel view at Rome, by which Cicero ultimately erases his own innovative status and aligns himself with the normative power of the past.

This book is an important contribution to the study of Cicero, as well as to the history of the late Republic and the history of ideas. It opens up promising new perspectives for further scholarship on the ‘intellectual work’ that transformed Roman religion in the first century b.c.e.Footnote ²