This volume is P.'s second foray into the murky waters of conspiracy in Rome. But whereas her first book, Conspiracy Narratives in Roman History (2004), dealt with how authors narrated the arcana of conspiratorial activity, this book turns rather to the less tractable question of conspiracy theory, the fear that something or someone is out there, and aiming to get you. P. argues, in brief, that the writings of Juvenal, Tacitus and Suetonius together constitute a golden age of conspiracy theory at Rome, an age ushered in by the succession of Hadrian, the suspicious circumstances of whose adoption and accession were already co-opted by Syme as underlying Tacitus' Annales 1 (R. Syme, Tacitus [1958], p. 481, quoted on p. 120). P. argues further that conspiracy theory ‘tells us a great deal about the range of responses to aporia, knowledge, and the shadowy zone between fact and fabrication’ (p. 3). This is also, in P.'s view, a more democratic reading practice, because conspiracy theory can reveal, albeit often as unfounded conjecture, the fissures caused by disparities in knowledge between those in and out of power. Conspiracy theory is thus an attempt to rationalise the unknown, and this book sets out ‘to question this latent conspiracism in Latin literature and interrogate its possible ramifications’ (p. 13).

In exploring the recesses of such fears, and their narrative representations, the book takes its place alongside – though it is not identical with – such works as S. Bartsch's Actors in the Audience, which adumbrates the double-speak, secrecy and duplicity that characterised the height of Roman autocracy. As it happens, this volume has also come out at a historically opportune moment when, at least in the United States, suspicion of government has become more vocal and prominent, and when political theorists have paid more than passing attention to how modern arcana imperii relate to the media and to executive power (e.g. R. Sagar, Secrets and Leaks: the Dilemma of State Secrecy [2013]). It is therefore appropriate that the book opens with a foreword by Mark Fenster, author of Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture (1999), and a colleague of P. at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Fenster cautions against the idea that conspiracy is a unique preserve of a particular time and place, specifically, present-day United States, and welcomes P.'s book precisely for making ‘the ancient world's anxiety about secret power and plots both familiar and strange’ (p. xi). What P. offers instead is more akin to an emotional grammar of ‘conspiracism’ (p. 3 and passim), parsing out its various psychological components – fear, blame, suspicion, conjecture and deterrence – often directed towards a polyvalent other, usually slaves and women, but sometimes also against such bulwarks of the system as the emperor himself.

Indeed, the political dimensions of conspiracy lie at the heart of this book. The first chapter collects some examples of Republican conspiracy thinking, chiefly to make the point that accusations of conspiracy have a rhetorical function, especially to evoke deep-seated social anxieties (as, e.g., Cicero does with Verres in Verr. 2.5). From here, P. leaps directly to the Hadrianic age and its authors. The second chapter on Juvenal focuses on the satirist's persona as it redefines as conspirators those elements in society to which he objects: women, foreigners, slaves. This chapter is also testament to the flexibility of conspiracy theory as a heuristic mechanism. Juvenal's persona, P. argues, is not a conspiracy theorist, but uses the language of conspiracy to explain away systemic inequalities for which he has no other vocabulary. Real conspiracy, of the Catilinarian or Pisonian varieties, becomes in his hands a mirage populated by generic outsiders.

The third chapter, on Tacitus, turns to elite responses to conspiracy, and specifically to the senatorial debate in Annales 14.43–4, in which Gaius Cassius Longinus speaks in favour of executing an entire slave familia, some of whose members have been discovered plotting their master's death. This is perhaps the most theoretical of the book's chapters, with a mere seven pages devoted to Tacitus' text, and the rest taken up with a rich and wide-ranging account of the moral paradoxes of deterrence, a process of intimidation wherein one generalises from individual experiences (a conspiracy) to all other potential eventualities (conspiracy theory). This chapter continues the broader theme of the fluidity of the divide between conspiracy and conspiracy theory, especially when what appears initially as senatorial suspicion turns out to be founded in fact. The final chapter develops the theme of suspicion in perhaps its most iconic guise, the paranoid emperor. P. argues that suspicion is ‘a unifying narrative framework’ (p. 89) in the Vitae Caesarum, which therefore casts the principate as a range of responses to the tension between emperor and subjects. Suspicion goes hand in hand with trust, ‘twin acts of mind [that] are social and epistemic as their core’ (p. 91), and P. surveys in particular the focalisation of suspicious thinking, as the principate moves from early trust to a late ‘climate of unease’ (p. 117). The Lives together thus show a continuous image of the emperor, who is forever torn between a healthy suspicion of insurrection and conspiracy and a sickly state of paranoia.

The idea that conspiracy theory derives from ‘a crisis of epistemology’ (p. 3) is potentially a rich one, prompting readings that look deeper into how narrative conventions interact with cultural habits of mind. P.'s book offers a tantalising view into what such an inquiry might look like and what it can achieve. It therefore stands to enrich not only work on conspiracy (in which P. is already an important voice), but other familiar approaches to the mannered double-speech and darkly cloistered aesthetics which characterise Roman imperial literature.

A few technicalities. The volume is handsome and well-produced. There are endnotes rather than footnotes, which encourages the flow of reading but makes accessing the Latin, universally relegated to the notes, difficult. A thorough index locorum will assist those readers wishing to consult only specific passages. Typographical errors are few: on p. 12, ‘the man from Triacola’ ought to be the man from ‘Triocala’, translating Triocalino illo (Cic. Verr. 2.5.11), as he is elsewhere on the same page; on p. 28, the ‘rights of Aphrodite’ ought be the ‘rites of Aphrodite’; on p. 39, Crassus was not given command of ten legions against Spartacus. Appian BC 1.118 gives eight legions (six new, two pre-existing), while Plutarch (Crassus 9–10) gives no precise number, though both sources mention Crassus' decimation of the army (perhaps the source of the confusion?); on p. 67, ‘Publius Sulla Cornelius’ ought to be ‘Publius Cornelius Sulla’.