‘The early Imperial artes are a potent expression of the pursuit of Roman self-knowledge at a time when Romans set themselves to investigating the world that centuries of continual warfare had won them and sought to understand what caused the predominance of their own civilization’ (15). This opening sentence of James Zainaldin’s book encapsulates the entire volume very well, creating curiosity and expectations in the reader which will not be disappointed.

The book of necessity begins with a definition of the term ars, according to its various contexts of use, and of the artes on which the monograph focuses, that is, the systematic treatises on various specialised disciplines. Through the analysis of the extant works on architecture (Vitruvius), agriculture (Columella and Celsus), medicine (Celsus), the art of war (Onasander and Frontinus) and the art of surveying (some writings from the Corpus agrimensorum Romanorum), Z. explains how the early imperial period brings about a change in the way the Romans conceive, write and use their artes. By recognising the premises of the imperial artes in the ‘higher artes’ of the republican period (esp. Cicero and Varro) and their roots in Greek culture, he identifies four cross-cutting features of the imperial artes: systematicity (the systematic and logical organisation of the contents of a given field of expertise), interdisciplinary (the artes are related to one another in their principles and methods), explanation (the artes are explanatory) and balance between theory and practice (theoretical knowledge is incomplete without the know-how acquired through experience). Thanks to the numerous examples provided and their detailed analysis, these theoretical assertions are well supported by literary evidence in the texts.

As the author rightly acknowledges in the introduction (11), the synthesis of the artes proposed in this book has been made possible by decades of specialist studies on individual authors and treatises. This extensive bibliography is taken into consideration in an appropriate manner, contributing to the key questions investigated in the specialised literature so far, such as the target audience of the treatises, the relationship with other literary genres and with science, and the Romanisation of the disciplines. An important point of discussion is the relationship between the artes and science/nature, or rather how the artes use the results and modes of scientific inquiry (observation, analogy, etc.) to explain and support theories. In this respect, ‘the artes are not sciences, or not merely sciences, because their purpose is not inquiry alone. But they are scientific in that they engage with science, implicate science into their own aims, and exhibit the fruits of science’ (7).

The value of this monograph lies in this effort to read the artes together. It aims to set the treatises of the early Roman empire into a synthetic view, by demonstrating the larger scientific culture to which they belong and reading them in the terms of that culture. This synthetic view helps to understand the relationships between the various artes, but above all to explain their emergence in the Roman historical and cultural context. The artes, in fact, are specifically Roman: they are the result of the Roman view of the world and of the Romans’ attempt to understand and explain the world, which then corresponded to the empire. Taking into account dedications, statements of method, distancing from previous traditions or declarations of adherence to specific schools of thought, Z. highlights the roots of this Roman scientific culture. In this sense, the book is of interest not only to specialists in the authors and passages discussed, but also to those who study the history of scientific thought and cultural history. Despite the breadth of his perspective, the author is able to guide even readers unfamiliar with this literature through his analysis, offering a good introduction to the artes as an expression of early imperial Roman scientific culture.

Alongside the detailed study of individual artes, which certainly still offers much work for scholars, the overview of these treatises provided by Z. allows us to understand their significance in the Roman cultural context of the early imperial era, the reasons for their emergence and the needs that these treatises sought to address. In this regard, the book offers a fine example of how Latin literature is anchored in its cultural context.