A thousand pages of priests may not be everybody's idea of heaven, but this book provides an extraordinarily useful research tool for those who work on the religious history of Rome or on many other areas of Roman life in which priests played a part. Fasti sacerdotum first appeared in German in 2005 as a three-volume work. This review concerns the one-volume translation published in 2008. The original consists (in Volume 1) of a year-by-year list of the names of certain or probable holders of religious office (51–572), followed by a list of the members in alphabetical order under their offices (573–646); and (in Volume 2) an alphabetical list of those listed in Volume 1 with short accounts, not so much biographies in the normal sense of the word, as basic information focusing on the evidence for, and the dates of, their religious office-holding; thus Volume 2 provides the evidence supporting the lists in Volume 1. Volume 3 consists of a series of studies of problems connected with the various office-holders and of the records through which we have knowledge of them.

This translation (by David Richardson) is a single-volume work, very substantial in bulk and price, and provides the three main lists in full together with the introduction to Volume 1, but only a selection of the studies from Volume 3 — four out of the thirteen sections. The four included are valuable and in many ways challenging studies (Livy and the annales maximi; the lists of calatores; the cult-personnel of Iuppiter Dolichenus; religion and administration in the later Empire): the situation left, however, is not entirely satisfactory, because the reader will need to check the German original to be sure what the ‘book’ discusses and what it does not. The boundary between what is a translation and what a new work derived from the original gets blurred at this point. Nor is it clear how the reader of the translation would find out what she/he is missing. What might seem curious is the fact that Volume 3, all in German, has to be so truncated; while Volume 1 is included, although it consists almost entirely of the names of officials and therefore, apart from the occasional footnote, has no need to be translated. This last point, however, is not in fact a mistake, but a necessary feature of the whole plan, because the strength of the one-volume format is precisely that the two main lists are available within the single volume. They are strictly interdependent, because the evidence for the annual lists of names and all the debates about who were members and who were not at different moments is to be found in the biographic section. So the user, working for instance on priestly colleges, has to turn constantly from one section to the other and back.

Nobody could possibly doubt the scholarly usefulness of this work. It covers 800 years and provides information about 3,590 religious officials in the city of Rome, only counting those allotted a running number, not those listed but not numbered as dubious or even forged. They include the official priests of Rome, but also other pagan priests and Jewish and Christian priests. The lists are the work of a substantial team working under the direction of Jörg Rüpke. Everyone working on the history of religions of Rome will be deep in debt to R. and his team. The work replaces a series of previous part-listings starting from the pioneering work of Ludwig Mercklin in 1848 and Carl Bardt in 1871, both limited to the republican period; this historiography is briefly surveyed at pp. 3–6.

The translations are workmanlike and, on the basis of random sampling, reliable enough. There are minor inconsistencies that might confuse some readers: thus die grosse Kollegien (amplissima collegia), normally in English ‘the major colleges’, appear sometimes as ‘the great colleges’ instead. That might be mistaken for a meaningful distinction, but is in fact just variatio. But my impression is that such infelicities are not often troublesome. The reader using the annual listing by colleges needs to be aware of the typographical conventions, discussed at pp. 18–19, that indicate which of those listed were certainly members in that year; which for one reason or another are only probable or possible members; and which may have joined in the course of the year. The argumentation and evidence behind these categories are to be found under the member's biography.

It is intriguing that the only form of listing that R. avoids is the form that Bardt adopted, viz. to list the republican priests recorded by Livy (218–167 b.c.e.) successively each under his decuria — the seat, plebeian or patrician — in the college to which he belonged. Yet this is the format adopted by the only (and admittedly miserable) fragments we have of the priestly fasti as inscribed in the time of Augustus (ILS 9338). The earlier names in these lists may well be fabricated (as R. argues for all early records (27–30)), but it is at least probable that the inscribed records were following the form of records kept in the college's commentarii. If so, the early annalists would have found the names of the priest who had died and of his successor, dated by consular year, and we need not postulate a record in the annales maximi, which R. as a matter of fact regards as ‘the most successful of all instances of apocryphal literature’ (38). It is a remarkable feature of the Livian entries that one can successfully reconstruct almost perfect lists of the membership of the augurs and pontifices for the whole of this period. The crucial clue may be provided by the decemviri s.f., for whom Livy's entries provide records of five, not ten places, two patrician, three plebeian, with no trace of the missing five. It is hard to see how complete decuriae could have dropped out, unless the entries were originally organized by decuriae, not scattered through an annual record.

There can be no question that the range of persons included in the prosopography has and will have great value in research. But there is some reason to have misgivings at least about the title: Fasti sacerdotum. The wording of the book's subtitle hints at the problem, but the book does not seem to explore the implications. Just as religio is not what we today think of as a ‘religion’, so sacerdos is not what we think of as a ‘priest’. In the case of the Roman priests themselves, there is no doubt that they have some priestly functions, but the key religious mediators between the Roman people and their deities were arguably magistrates rather than priests. It is magistrates who carry out the public rituals and take vows on behalf of the state, while decisions on religious matters are taken by the senate, being the ex-magistrates, albeit on the advice of the priestly colleges. So the interface between priests and magistrates should not be seen as being between religious and secular; rather it is between the sphere of action, the negotiating between men and deities, and the sphere of reflection on the principles and rules controlling relations between men and deities. It is the priests who keep records of past decisions and successful procedures (on this whole issue, see John Scheid, ‘Le prêtre et le magistrat’, in C. Nicolet (ed.), Des ordres à Rome (1984), 243–80).

If you were to draw circles representing the range of activity of the different groups of ‘officials’ included in this book — Roman, Greek, Isiac, Jewish, Christian — they would certainly all intersect to a limited extent; but much of their activity would radically differ. The Roman model does not even fit the Greek case, still less the Christian. The possible complexities of definition are well illustrated by the curious case of the ‘priests’ of Iuppiter Dolichenus, known to us from the inscriptions of the sanctuary on the Aventine. In one of his extended discussions (51–6), R. tries to make sense of the multiplicity of different grades and denominations referred to in these documents; as one would expect of him, he has an original and trenchant theory, which may be right. But what is quite clear is that the complexities are very considerable even as displayed in a limited documentation. Meanwhile other cases would produce different problems of definition. The risk is that readers, and particularly non-specialist and occasional readers, may be deceived into thinking that those included in the book shared some fundamental religious unity of type, when they have in fact little to unite them except the modern decision to call them ‘priests’. It would be a mistake to infer, for example, that Romans thought of Jewish priests as resembling what they understood by sacerdotes. Of course, Fasti sacerdotum is not making any such claim; but there is room here for rich misunderstanding.

It would, however, be unpardonably ungracious to carp at so useful a work, the fruit of so much care, commitment and thought: future generations of scholars searching for elusive Roman priests will have every reason to bless the name of Rüpke.