Hartnett’s The Remarkable Life, Death, and Afterlife of an Ordinary Roman is marketed as a history from below. Instead of writing Roman history as biographies of emperors such as Augustus and Constantine, H. explores Roman society and culture through the ‘ordinary Roman’ Flavius Agricola. The book comes in two parts. Part one is a biographical microhistory of Flavius Agricola, part two an object history of his funerary monument after its discovery. In the interest of space, only part one is considered here.

Agricola is known through his famous metric epitaph (CIL 6.17985a). It was discovered during excavations for Bernini’s monumental baldacchino, which marks the spot of St Peter’s grave in his Vatican basilica. The inscription counsels visitors to Agricola’s tomb to ‘drink deep, wreathe your head with flowers, and do not refuse to make love with pretty girls’, closing with the remark that ‘after death, earth and fire devour all the rest’.

The epitaph was destroyed on papal orders for its scandalous pagan sentiments, but Agricola’s life-sized effigy survives. It shows a bearded, middle-aged man reclining on a couch, holding a cup and wreathing himself. In ch. 1, H. persuasively places the sculpture and its now-lost urn in the central niche of Tomb S of the Vatican necropolis and offers a masterful visual analysis of the sculpture. Ch. 2 argues that Agricola’s family was probably of humble, maybe servile origins because it was enfranchised under the Flavians. This biographical assumption is then contrasted with his lavish tomb and its décor. Ch. 3 focuses on Agricola’s wife of thirty years, Flavia Primitiva, whom the inscription identifies as a ‘chaste worshipper of Isis’ and who was the mother of an Aurelius Primitivus, who is praised for — or pressured into — looking after the tomb. Ch. 4 offers a lively account of the Iseum Campense where Primitiva may have worshipped. Ch. 5 explores Agricola’s ‘worldview’ and wonders whether it was compatible with that of his wife. Ch. 6 situates the monument within the well-established context of Roman tombside feasting.

The genre of biographical microhistory is prone to narrow readings of insufficient evidence, and H.’s otherwise excellent book shows this tendency. The Flavian gentilicium is undiagnostic on its own. Agricola could have been the descendant of an imperial slave, which is H.’s preferred reading. And a member of the familia Caesaris could have been of relatively humble station as H. assumes, but also one of the richest and most powerful men of his age such as Flavius Abascantus, who makes a brief appearance through his wife’s tomb. But rather more likely, Agricola’s father or grandfather became a Flavius for one of several more common reasons: surviving twenty-five years of service in an auxiliary unit, enfranchisement as a local magistrate through the lex Flavia municipalis, or loyalty towards the emperor, as in the case of Flavius Josephus. The fact that Primitiva had a son by another man does not suggest that she was widowed, as H. considers most likely. One could think of several other options, for instance divorce. Agricola’s choice to elide his profession or career on his epitaph was possibly due to its position in the tomb, where it faced a familial audience with access to the urn. Agricola may have boasted about his successes and the cost of his tomb in a now-lost public-facing inscription, as did the owners of the neighbouring mausolea. Neither his professed love of wine, conviviality and sex nor his glum view of the afterlife necessarily collided with the religious views of Primitiva. One of H.’s models for such conflict is Propertius 2.33, where Isiac observance is compatible with the puella’s otherwise decidedly unchaste life, even though the exclusus amator has to forgo intercourse during ten nights of ritual.

None of these objections takes away from H.’s often brilliant accounts of life in Antonine Rome from Tibur to the Iseum Campense. They would be pedantic and ungenerous in a short review, if H. did not consider his biographical approach as an intervention against a social history that sees the particular in individual lives only within the context of the ‘broader dynamics of Roman society and culture’ (104). H. worries that broader contextualisation ‘threatens to obscure the essential point of this project, namely that this constellation of issues and circumstances were particular to our cast of characters’ (104). But the criticisms voiced above show that we only know very little about H.’s cast of characters.

The book shines exactly where H. can contextualise Agricola’s representational choices and personal attitudes within well-understood cultural practices. Situating an individual in a particular cultural milieu is not an attempt to iron ‘everything … into smooth complicity’ (105). It also does not deny that life was always messy. As Bourdieu argued, our individual choices are constrained by our habitus, which in turn is rooted in the material conditions of our lives. But constraints do not make our individual lives and choices any less unique. In the idiom of personality psychology, we are unique because the combination of traits and preferences we share with others is itself unrepeatable. As a result, H.’s insistence on studying individuality as a corrective to typological reduction misidentifies the heuristic problem. An empathetic microhistory of three thinly attested individuals requires more, not less population-level analysis, because individuality itself is a comparative judgement that only makes sense in relation to the lives of others.