In his Preface, David Rohrbacher announces his wish to take the Historia Augusta (HA) out of the hands of historians and philologists and give it to ‘all those interested in the ancient world’ (ix). In his Introduction, R. says that this depends on accepting that ‘one of the primary purposes for which the whole work was created’ was to act as a vehicle for literary allusion (3). He therefore diverges from the traditional, historical, approach of HA-research and offers instead ‘a literary study of the work that begins with understanding the author as a creative writer’ (4).

But R. first summarizes what traditional HA-scholarship has taught us. The HA is a set of ‘Lives’ of Roman emperors and their heirs, from the early second to the late third century. Though resembling Suetonius' Caesares, it purports to be the work of not one but six authors, whose contributions were compiled and published by a single editor around a.d. 300. Lacunae suggest damage in transmission. HA-research has shown that, on the contrary, it is the work of one author, written around a.d. 400. It is not serious biography since it is riddled with invention, especially after the ‘Life’ of Caracalla. Even its lacunae are bogus. R. argues that this does not make the HA-author deceitful since he never set out to write historical biography. The work is ‘literary fiction’, and its ‘most pronounced literary element’ is allusion (14).

In ch. 1, R. notes the pervasiveness of allusion in ancient, especially late Roman, literature, with special reference to Ammianus Marcellinus (here he is strongly influenced by Gavin Kelly's Ammianus Marcellinus: The Allusive Historian (2008)). In the case of the HA, R. identifies a complex skein of allusions to other authors. In ch. 2, he considers the likely readership. Against the thrust of modern scholarship, R. contends that the HA should be read as a work of entertainment not instruction. With Syme, therefore, he sees the HA-author as some sort of ‘rogue grammarian’ (60, 74), but he differs in attributing more openness and purpose to his work. It is a piece of public scholarship (77), intended for a specific reading-community: ‘scholars at play in the early-fifth century’ (175). We should envisage the HA’s audience as a small circle of intellectuals, immersed in biography and epitomized history, whom the HA-author did not try to fool but rather presented with a text that tested their literary knowledge and provoked discussion (82).

In ch. 3, influenced by Alan Cameron's The Last Pagans of Rome (2011), R. returns to develop the proposition that, despite the turmoil of the age, the HA is not part of any live political or religious debate. Thus (contra Cameron), though the HA-author indeed parodies Jerome, he does so not out of religious ideology but because Jerome is a controversial and generally ‘obnoxious’ (103) contemporary figure, the writer of false biographies of the founders of monasticism (107–8).

In his final chapter, R. addresses the question of the HA’s date. Eschewing the conventional method of searching for internal historical clues, he turns to literary allusions. Those to Ammianus Marcellinus and Jerome give a terminus post quem of a.d. 394–398 (157–8); those to the success of the Petronii Probi give 394 or 406; and possible ones to child-emperors and to Constantine III take us to after 407 (162–9). In an Afterword, R. summarizes his case and suggests that the HA was never intended to be published (172). Ahistorical in nature, it slipped into the historical stream only later, when people were no longer able to recognize it as a jeu d'esprit.

As someone who has long pressed for a change in approach to the HA, I very much welcome this book. Though the vast majority of R.’s points are not new, he is scrupulous in admitting his debt to previous scholarship, and he makes a valuable contribution to knowledge by setting these within a different conceptual framework. Within this framework, he makes some very plausible arguments, above all, concerning the non-tendentious nature of the HA. R. certainly deserves to be read, but he raises a number of additional questions. I do not understand why the HA-author wrote a fairly serious historical first half and an unrestrainedly fantastical second. R.’s explanation (85) is that he began by simply epitomizing Marius Maximus (whom R. takes as his main source down to the early third century) but then developed a taste for allusion and invention. However, if his real love was word-games, why did he put so much effort into straight history? Likewise, I cannot quite see how R.’s reading-group operated. Was it dominated by the HA-author as the creator of its sole significant work, or did other members seek to emulate him? Multiple contribution might help explain the HA’s affectation of its own joint authorship. And the group's reading appears uneven. Given the importance of paideia, one can easily understand how its members caught allusions to the classical canon, and even to ‘modern classics’ such as the biographies of Marius Maximus and Ammianus Marcellinus' Res Gestae. But how easy was it for them to access Dexippus, and why were they restricted to only ‘a limited selection of works’ of Jerome (103)? Did the HA-author distribute some sort of seminar handbook? Finally, if the HA is to be studied as literature, how may this be done? A strong temptation is to join R. in hunting out literary allusions. The HA-author's criticism of the political fickleness of Gauls brings to mind, for example, similar remarks in the Expositio totius mundi et gentium. However, though not an historian, he cannot have been totally ignorant of recent history, and what he says could easily have come from general knowledge of the many usurpations of late Roman Gaul. A continued hunt for literary allusions would, in fact, be as sterile as that for historical ones. But if the HA is to be treated directly as literature, what sort of literature is it? It is not directly jokey, so cannot be categorized as ‘humour’; and if it simply parrots its sources it can hardly be called ‘satire’.