Whether or not Syme made a convincing case for revolution at Rome, his Roman Revolution did not effect a revolution in Roman history. To be sure, his choice of where to start and where to end his discussion was unorthodox (if orthodoxy was the old edition of the Cambridge Ancient History or Rice Holmes or the periodization of Oxford GreatsFootnote ¹), but his relentless focus on individual political actors and their relations with one another differs from the emphasis of earlier scholars only in its priorities and intensity. Whether or not Wallace-Hadrill makes a convincing case for revolution at Rome, Rome's Cultural Revolution is revolutionary. To be sure, the individual parts of the book have been variously anticipated in particular studies, but the insistence that what happens in the history of buildings, instrumentum domesticum, dress, and monuments constitutes not simply the background to a political story, but is itself the story of Late Republican Rome — in W.-H.'s own words ‘that the political transformation of the Roman world is integrally connected to its cultural transformation’ (xix) — challenges the assumptions on which Roman historians have built the history of the Republic ever since Asinius Pollio.Footnote ²

Until the 1974 conference which issued two years later in Hellenismus in Mittelitalien, discussions of Italy in the Republic were written as though her archaeological story was restricted to the moyenne durée.Footnote ³Hellenismus showed that when it came to the last few centuries b.c.e.., at least, archaeological timescales in the study of central Italy could be very precise. With such precision came the possibility that the archaeology could contribute, not merely to economic history and to the broad social history embedded in changing settlement patterns, but also to political history. Discussions of Rome and Italy no longer needed to agonize over what Appian (1.36) meant by dokimasia or Diodoros (37.13) by euthunai in the accounts of Italian reactions to Drusus’ legislation, or whether Velleius (2.15) correctly described Italian aims in the Social War. Relations with Rome could be described in thicker terms.

Hellenismus has been recognized as a landmark. And the priorities of archaeologists have reflected this.Footnote ⁴ Yet its impact on the history of Rome in the last two centuries b.c.e. has been minimal. The cultural politics of Italy are too often reduced to a ritual mention of the sanctuary at Pietrabbondante or sidelined into a chapter of their own.Footnote ⁵ As the literary turn of the nineties has taken over from the archaeological turn of the sixties, it is Roman discourse, not the languages of Italian material culture, that has come under scrutiny.Footnote ⁶ Rome's political history has continued to be told on the basis of later tradition rather than contemporary material culture.Footnote ⁷

Rome's Cultural Revolution makes a bold second attempt to effect the historical revolution Hellenismus has failed to produce (though W.-H. himself describes what he has done more modestly as ‘to invite debate’ (xix)). It is not simply that this book provides the sequel to Hellenismus, for which W.-H. himself called more than a decade ago in an essay which needs to be read as a preface to this book.Footnote ⁸ It is that this book, with its emphasis on identity, on knowledge, and on consumers and fashion, raises, though it does not signal, profound questions about historical agency that Hellenismus only hinted at. The book certainly contains enough live ammunition for a rebellious army, but will it send them in the right direction?

THE PLAN OF ATTACK

W.-H. divides his book into four parts, each consisting of two chapters: ‘Cultures and Identities’, ‘Building Identities’, ‘Knowledge and Power’, and ‘The Consumer Revolution’. The first chapter is concerned largely with theoretical questions. Subsequently the book constitutes a survey of the culture of Rome and Italy broadly from the Punic War to Augustus. Ch. 2 discusses how Romans dressed and what languages the peoples of Italy spoke, with a particular focus on Roman theorizing about language. Ch. 3 is concerned to plot languages and material culture across Italy, in particular tracing what happens to monumental building, climaxing with the ‘textbook examples’ of urban and rural development provided by Pompeii and Pietrabbondante. Ch. 4 is an analysis of Greek and Roman elements in architecture both in theory, in Vitruvius, and in practice, though allowing its discussion of the gymnasium to encompass very much more than merely its built form. Chs 5 and 6 are about the cultural construction of time and space, through antiquarianism and the rhetoric of ancestral tradition on the one hand, and through the sense of place in the city on the other, ending with a long discussion of the Forma Urbis Romae. The final chapters look at the culture of luxury, both discursively and substantially, and at the rôle and nature of fashion, using the spread of replica or mass-produced artefacts to trace patterns of material desire for both expensive and relatively humble goods.

These chapters add up to the fullest and most accessible survey in any language to date of the material culture and structure of knowledge in Italy and Rome in the last two centuries b.c.e. We will discuss these chapters in order below, before asking what they together contribute to our understanding of Rome, culture, and revolution. The book achieves much of its impact by juxtaposing material with intellectual ways of knowing. Its aim is not to offer a description of the culture of Roman Italy. Rather, it seeks to contribute to wider debates on the understanding of the construction of identity and its significance and to establish that in these years there was a ‘fundamental shift in the location of authority’ ‘preparing the way for radical political change’ (both phrases, 215).

As the overlap between the titles of the sections, and as the titles of the first two chapters (‘Culture, identity and power’ and ‘Dress, language and identity’), show, the parts of this book are not thematically discrete. Identity, knowledge and power are there throughout. Indeed, the questions with which the reader is left at the end concern precisely these issues: exactly whose identity are we talking about? What qualifies some knowledge for inclusion and leaves other knowledge out? What does all this have to do with what sort of power?

MUSTERING RESOURCES

Ch. 1 starts with Ennius and Favorinus to establish a common ‘form of cultural triangulation that is one of the most remarkable features of the Roman world’ (5): that is, that wherever individuals in Italy or the provinces are from, they have to locate themselves not simply in relation to Roman but also to Greek culture. W.-H. insists on this triangulation and rejects the usual metaphors of fusion and hybridity. That there are (at least) three positions always in play in questions of identity is W.-H.'s most crucial and important theoretical insight. At least from the Elder Cato onwards (and no doubt earlier had earlier political actors left us the materials in which we could trace their self-positioning), we can observe everyone who would be a political actor in relation to Rome positioning himself not simply within Rome itself but in relation to Italy, to the Greek world both narrowly and broadly conceived, and to the wider Mediterranean. To read Cato's interventions with regard to Rhodes (ORF ₂ 163–71), Carthage (ORF ₂ 191–5), Lusitania (ORF ₂ 154–5, 196–9), Sardinia (Plutarch, Cato Maior 6.2, cf. ORF ₂ 173), the Greeks (ORF ₂ 189), or the peoples of Italy (in the Origines) as interventions targeted solely at those in the Roman Forum is to ignore that Rome was a Hellenistic power, and to misrecognize the networking that constituted and enabled Roman imperialism.Footnote ⁹ Curiously, however, Cato is more or less ignored by W.-H. until he needs his tirades on luxury.

Rather than run with this brilliant opening perception about cultural triangulation, W.-H. takes his reader back a step, to a survey of archaeologists’ theorizing on cultural identity and the ‘Romanization’ debate. The juxtaposition of the trilingual Ennius with archaeological theory is both successful and problematic. It is highly successful since it enables ‘fusion’, ‘hybridization’, ‘creolization’ etc. to be blown out of the water. With Ennius from Rudiae and Favorinus from Arelate in the foreground, formulations which present an ‘élite’ Roman culture interacting with a sub-élite ‘creole’ culture look properly absurd. It is problematic since the examples of Ennius and Favorinus turn on language-use and encourage W.-H. to think that language provides a model for culture more broadly. Adams’ conclusion that bilingualism, not creole languages, marks the Roman world is particularly influential here.Footnote ¹⁰ Had W.-H. devoted more time to Cato, then any thought that the various cultures which political actors juggle are separate systems linked coherently and indissolubly by rules, or indeed have to be acquired as a whole or not at all, could not have been sustained. Yet W.-H. proceeds with the language analogy to his very last page.

The opening move of ch. 2 is just as brilliant as that of ch. 1. W.-H. leads off with an anecdote from Suetonius (Augustus 98) in which the aged Augustus ‘inter varia munuscula togas insuper et pallia distribuit’, laying down the rule that Romans should dress as Greeks and Greeks as Romans. W.-H. rightly stresses that Suetonius, scholar and bureaucrat and himself from North Africa, had a vested interest in this ‘rule’. He also draws attention to some of the problems in the evidence, even for Hadrian's Hellenism. But he neither exploits the gap between theory and practice, nor explores the continuous juggling of Greek and Roman that every emperor was obliged to attempt. More puzzling is the argument two pages later, when W.-H. observes that Greek and Roman were not a matching pair, since ‘Greek’ referred to a cultural identity, and ‘Roman’ to a political one. For having made this observation, he nevertheless insists that Roman discourse treats ‘Greek’ and ‘Roman’ ‘as a balanced and matching pair’, without pursuing the possibility that these might always have been heard as a mismatch. W.-H. in fact knows this well, indeed he goes on to demonstrate, in an excellent discussion of dress, that the ‘Greek’ pallium is a Roman invention, not corresponding to any Greek dress term, for Greeks happily saw their himation in the Roman toga (51). This is a striking case where what someone wears and what they say they are wearing may position them in distinctly different places. What they are then represented as wearing in the visual arts positions them differently again.Footnote ¹¹

That the discourse about cultural practices is independent of those practices is reinforced by the discussion of language-use in the second half of the chapter. W.-H. once more has a wonderful case to put in the foreground, Valerius Maximus’ claim (2.2.2–3) that Roman magistrates in the past refused to employ Greek in communication with Greeks. As W.-H. points out, this was not a fact about the third and second century b.c.e. past, but a political position in what was a long-running argument about how cultural superiority was best established, an argument which happened not between Romans and Greeks but between Romans. Valerius’ scruples about linguistic etiquette have to be seen against Varro's monumental intervention in learning about Latin with which W.-H. ends his chapter. When the grammarians reject natura, the usage of native speakers, as the basis of good Latinity in favour of consuetudo, the ever more rational rules by which they themselves prescribed customary practice, they are making a political intervention. The anecdote with which W.-H. ends his chapter is as apt as the one that begins it, as he quotes (again from Suetonius, this time de Grammaticis 22) Pomponius Marcellinus on whether Tiberius’ usage could make a word good Latin: ‘Caesar can give citizenship to a man, but not to a word.’ Just as stories tell of Augustus handing out togas and pallia but insisting that those in the Forum must wear togas (Suetonius, Augustus 45), so too they tell of Tiberius handing out foreign words but insisting on purging hellenisms from Senate decrees (Suetonius, Tiberius 71). Far from Roman discourse ignoring that to be Roman was a political matter, and to be Greek a cultural matter, it reinforces it at every anecdotal term.

Varro returns as a major player in chs 5 and 6, but in ch. 3, W.-H. turns to archaeology. Taking the cemetery from Oleggio, just west of Milan, as his opening example, he traces the gradual abandonment of La Tène burial practices and the adoption of trends from the Hellenistic world, arguing once more for the advantage of a model of ‘bilingualism’ rather than hybridization. We are given our most detailed description of the language map of Italy which is then juxtaposed to the map of material culture. This is the most traditional chapter of the book, surveying the rôle of Roman colonies and of the Social War, and going on to describe Praeneste and Pietrabbondante. W.-H.'s unrivalled knowledge of recent archaeological work in Italy is put at our disposal here as we are given a guided tour of the most important studies by Italian archaeologists. W.-H. is at his best when insisting, once more, upon triangulation — that the peoples of Italy position themselves separately in relationship to Rome and to the Greek world (98) — and when insisting that the maps of the distribution of different cultural traits do not simply map on to each other (100). W.-H. is rightly insistent that the decision not to adopt urban forms is likely to have been as deliberate as decisions to adopt them, but he wavers over the question of agency, and the chapter ends with the claim that ‘Roman power and Greek culture engender radical transformations of society and economy’ (our emphasis).

Ch. 4 starts the march from Italy to Rome, focusing on the definition of a new Roman identity to accommodate, and accord with, the political and cultural transformations that mark the shift from Republic to Empire. The chief spokesperson for this new identity is Vitruvius, a figure crying out to be rescued from the clutches of Renaissance art-historians. Few scholars have given sufficient emphasis to his importance as an Augustan writer, or to the genre of his De architectura. Although W.-H.'s Vitruvius is still primarily a writer of architecture rather than of literature, it is an architecture with a staunch moral message, not a handbook of rules or styles, but a conceptual framework for understanding the very Romanness of Roman building. In this sense, he joins Kristina Milnor, who has shown how Vitruvius uses the gendering of space to speak to Augustan ideas of domestic life, in drawing attention to his loaded comparisons between Greek and Roman practice.Footnote ¹²

Roman superiority relies on knowledge of Greek culture. W.-H. argues that we should not see Vitruvius’ use of Greek manuals, or indeed any other kind of cultural borrowing, as unimaginative. Borrowing flatters those who are borrowed from and enhances the borrower, and in this case the effect is to make Vitruvius’ treatise not merely descriptive of specific buildings or techniques, but prescriptive, and to make building not just an activity but a discipline. Once this is established, there can be nothing random about a successful Roman structure. For structures (and their makers) to assume their rightful place in a history of the discipline, they must have been built with rationale and rigour. This awareness lends unity to Rome's architecture, a logic worthy of study. The moment there is logic, building becomes part of a wider world order.

This world order is as much about Rome as it is about Augustus. In a clever move, W.-H. turns from the ‘transposition’ and ‘relocation’ of Hellenistic theory to the multifarious ways in which Vitruvius uses Greek architecture as a counterweight to throw the Roman into relief. In one-on-one combat, ‘Greek’ architecture demands a ‘Roman’ opponent, and this, that Roman and Italic style pack a combined punch, a mustering of the divergent resources that Italy possesses into a single tradition, and with it, a revision of what constitutes ‘the local’. Seen like this, Vitruvius’ success is nothing less than the ‘rebuilding of Roman identity through architecture’ (149). He has ‘no perception of the “revolution” which twentieth-century architectural history sees in Roman architecture’ (208). His is a written revolution, which lies in exploiting difference within continuity, ‘in the demonstration that Greek theory could be reconciled with current practice in Italy without compromising identity’ (209).

Getting to this point has involved analysis of archaeological as well as literary evidence to shed light on the different ways in which Greekness competes with Romanness in theatres, the domus, the villa. But this puncturing of the literary frame, and the parallel plans and pictures that the chapter provides, raise Greek and Roman questions beyond Vitruvius’ structure. Gymnasia are Greek in origin, as are identifiable elements of theatre design, but is the Greek in these cultural forms the same in every case? And by this, we don’t just mean, did incorporating a gymnasium into a Roman house have a similar effect to giving a statue of a Roman general a buff Greek torso? Rather we mean that the Greece that they reference is of different times and places; sometimes fifth century b.c.e., sometimes Hellenistic, sometimes mainland Greek, sometimes not, sometimes near, sometimes distant. This realization is crucial when it comes to Augustus and his portraiture's return to the Classical. It is a shame that Egypt barely features in the book, except as ‘Egyptomania’ or fashion.

The problems of treating the ‘Greek’ of Greek culture as timeless in the way that we might treat the ‘Greek’ of Greek language as timeless comes out most clearly in relation to iconography. Configuring art as language does not tell us what Greekness looks like. In describing a visitor's entry to the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii, W.-H. writes that he ‘begins to cross a threshold from Roman to Greek, except that the atrium is itself reassuringly Roman, as the piles of arms depicted in the decoration underline. But as he passes down the andrones to the hospitalia with their views of porticus and xystra, and gazes in the climactic west-facing suite at scenes of Dionysus and Ariadne and the exotic mysteries of Bacchic initiation, he knows he has moved to another world’ (204). Another world, yes, but a Greek one? Rome had witnessed Antony identify with Dionysus, the rise and restriction of the cult of Bacchus, and Catullus 64. Dionysiac-themed paintings and statuary were de rigueur in Pompeii. Welch has argued that the characteristic aesthetic of Roman domestic space (‘Greek’ art and the piles of arms in the Villa of the Mysteries) has its origins in the distinctly Roman display of war booty in atrium houses of the mid-Republic.Footnote ¹³ Where cultural contact is so messy (as W.-H. himself realizes) can ‘Greek’ be a valid visual category? As W.-H. dissolves this villa into ‘its constituent antitheses’ (204) we lose sight of the triangulation that is vital for the understanding of what is going on.

In chs 5 and 6, we arrive in Rome proper, and ‘grasp the nettle’ that is the ‘Augustan Revolution’. For W.-H. the seismic shift that is the Principate is not a matter of change of mores but a matter of change in who has authority over mores, in who could lay claim to be handing down tradition. The more that Rome's élite felt disempowered in a time of conflict, the more they relied on their ancestors and on invocations of the mos maiorum, erecting lavish monuments in honour of their own family-members (e.g. the statues, arch and tomb of the Scipios) and referencing the achievements and practice of Rome's ancestors. The past was their means of persuasion but it was becoming ever harder to live that past.

As the gap between past and present grew, intellectuals like Varro stepped up to turn that gap into an object of study. The past was a foreign country needing to be recovered. Any admission that it had been lost damaged élite authority. Cicero and Augustine were right, ‘Varro is Rome's second founder, preserving it from the ruin of forgetfulness’ (233). It is unsurprising, given this radical conservatism, that Augustus should lean on Varro in making his own anomalous position a return to real Romanness. ‘It is the perfect revolution, which in changing everything changes also the perception of what is normal and traditional, and so erases its own revolutionary status’ (258).

Ch. 6 explores how this works in and for the city. W.-H. is concerned not with the physical fabric but, in a line of argument which owes not a little to Nicolet, in how order was brought to this environment, retrospectively, both by antiquarians and by the Princeps, about how Rome was made mappable.Footnote ¹⁴ This mapping works in a ‘real’ sense in the creation of the fourteen regions, subdivided into several hundred vici, in Augustus’ revival of the census and his incorporation into local ritual in the cult and altars of the Genius Augusti, and in a few fragments which seem to presage the Severan marble plan. And it works in an academic sense in Varro's De lingua latina, concerned primarily with etymology, not topography. Here, beginning in 5.41, Varro uses explanation of various place names to connect the modern and ancient city. Anyone who has read this text knows how difficult it is to decipher: something which, W.-H. concludes, ‘throws into relief just how hard a city republican Rome was to know’ (264). But this is almost to miss the trick that he has rehearsed. What does it matter if Varro's version is confusing? It is the attempt that is crucial, the knowledge that understanding where Rome has got to demands a rewrite of her history.

After this, the last two chapters (Part IV: ‘The Consumer Revolution’) move from knowledge and power to spending power, and the question of how Rome and her people coped with the influx of artefacts from the East. This is a hot topic at the moment.Footnote ¹⁵ W.-H.'s particular contribution is to see luxury as a key term of analysis, building on Catharine Edwards’ early work to expose the mechanisms by which the Romans both promoted and prohibited displays of monetary and cultural capital, and the broader anxieties that lay beneath such debates.Footnote ¹⁶ Using Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees or Private Vices, Publick Benefits, first printed in 1714, as a way in, he ranges widely, from the sumptuary legislation of the Republic to the Elder Pliny's condemnation of the growth of luxury under Titus. He highlights, for example, how the focus on food that is found in the laws, and in the work of the moralists and satirists, cannot be seen in isolation from the defining role of the symposium as a Greek political and social institution.

The argumentation here is subtle and complex, but the chief concern is how the Romans remained ‘Roman’ in the face of these challenges, and how social order was maintained. Sumptuary laws were necessary to ensure that money did not buy sufficient influence as to up-end the élite and upset established hierarchies. But they also made what they controlled particularly desirable, and the wealthy look for increasingly innovative, more insidious, ways to compete with one another. Safer, perhaps, to acknowledge that luxury was a language of rank. By 22 C.E. under Tiberius, sumptuary laws were a thing of the past, and luxury recognized as an ‘affirmation of status, success, belonging’ (353). Not that this relieved the anxiety: as trade increased, freedmen and Italic élites grew rich, putting up monuments which threatened to condemn all performative aspects of Roman society as vanity.

The last, and longest, chapter comes as something of a shock. A book which has dealt so skilfully with issues as fundamental as the language spoken, and which has insisted, if sometimes fitfully, that when people adopt features that they have learned from others, they do so deliberately, ends with a chapter entitled ‘waves of fashion’ (most fully developed in the conclusion: ‘waves of fashion sweep in successively from the eastern Mediterranean to break on the shores of Roman consumer appetite’ (435)).Footnote ¹⁷ This is loose talk. It is as if the canny individuals who worked so hard to turn knowledge into the power to achieve particular ends, and argued so hard to control the material culture others are allowed to use, have given up, taken to the couch and resigned themselves to a decadent life of passivity. ‘Conquest’, we are told, ‘transformed the economy, society and culture of Rome’ (356). More loose talk: the Romans transformed their society, economy, and culture by conquest. If Pliny is right that fashions for particular items began with the display of those items at particular triumphs, those who displayed them can hardly have been ignorant of the effect of doing so.Footnote ¹⁸

All this loose talk costs lives. ‘Alexandrian art had already made its impact felt’ (357), there is an ‘outbreak of Egyptianising motifs’ (357), ‘lamps were an essential part of a way of life that penetrates in a capillary fashion to all levels’ (390), ‘Arretine simply displaces the black ware production of many centuries’ (415); ‘Campana B … shows no impact of the major waves of fashion that affect eastern production’ (409); ‘Luxury revels in diversity’ (435). The archaeologist's description has displaced the historian's insistence on human agency. ‘Vestorius’ production was developed’ (360), we are told of the man who is taken as the embodiment of ‘the three stages of a wave pattern that characterises Roman material culture at this period: initial importation from the eastern Mediterranean, secondary production in Italy, and tertiary exportation outwards from Italy across the Mediterranean’. That pattern is glossed in terms of ‘appropriation of this production by Italian centres’ and of ‘Italian products’ stimulating ‘a further diffusion of production, generating provincial products on Italian models’. Later we find it said of lamps that ‘production is transferred to Italy, domesticated, simplified, replicated and so diffused through the empire’ (384–6).

Where have all the actors gone? W.-H. insists that ‘Hellenization’ and ‘Romanization’ are not two separate phenomena (361), and rightly, since any attempt to keep Hellenizing behaviour distinct from Romanizing behaviour will fail in the face of a game in which they are just two possible moves and where the players are always positioning themselves in relation to one or more other options. But instead of concentrating on the players, W.-H. chooses to animate the board on which they play. The image W.-H. deploys, and that he revisits several times, is of Rome as a heart drawing the wealth, skills and people from the eastern Mediterranean and then recirculating them westwards: ‘In a circulation system pumped by the heart of the conquest city of Rome, ideas and goods diffused over a wide distance’ (370); ‘the Sullan sack of Athens is still part of the diastole phase, when goods, ideas and tastes are pumped towards Rome; the systole phase where ideas and tastes pump back out belongs to the first century CE’ (391). In place of a sophisticated battle for knowledge and authority we have here an economist's model for the innumerate, in which ideas and tastes sometimes act on their own, and sometimes the city of Rome acts for them, but no individual is able to intervene. Greeks and Romans have become the apprentices of some mighty automaton.

Some of them live to tell the tale. We still find a few real human hearts beating. One of W.-H.'s most valuable insights is that Romans acquired goods from the Hellenistic world because that world was already geared up to supply them, that what we see is not plundering, but ‘Romans participating in a hellenistic context in which art in multiples already serves a world of luxury’ (364). He makes use of the disagreement between Pliny and ‘candelabrum experts’ over where and why the candelabra known as ‘Corinthian’ were made, to insist that ‘Roman buyers … attached labels more as desirable brand names than authentic marks of origin’ (374). Sometimes, at least, it is ‘Roman desire for the hellenistic’ that starts the ‘fashion wave’ (406). But such is his insistence on waves and on the three stage model of introduction, domestication, and export, that only the most determined reader will manage to excavate the active role of ‘tension and competition between different social groups’ upon which he insists in his final paragraph. This is particularly frustrating, given his series of apposite and revealing case-studies.Footnote ¹⁹

FULFILLING ITS MISSION

W.-H.'s book repays close reading. But in what sense does the sum of its parts amount to ‘Rome's Cultural Revolution’? It is hard to imagine a more audacious title, and not just in the debt to Syme about which the narrative is somewhat coy.Footnote ²⁰ Its triumvirate of components each asks for definition: Where is Rome? What is culture? When is this revolution? The world which W.-H. reveals is certainly subject to major change. The Rome of the Elder Pliny is a different Rome from in the Late Republic: it looks different on the ground, feels different in the head, is subject to new gods in the imperial family, a new political system. But where are the borders of this Rome? This is not The Roman Cultural Revolution, as it is for Habinek and Schiesaro, but Rome's. W.-H.'s book restricts itself not to Rome proper but to Italy, bringing the latest archaeological research to bear to reveal new aspects of the picture provided by scholars such as Potter and Crawford.Footnote ²¹ But even this decision raises questions about how the city and her satellites relate in a more physical sense than he acknowledges. Not in terms of influence, where he is excellent on showing that the former is not necessarily the ‘transmitter’ of ‘Hellenization’ which dictates how the others appear, but in terms of where those living there thought Rome was. Only in ch. 6 are we explicitly confined to the capital, whereas in chs 4 and 5 we inhabit a more intellectual realm, and in chs 3, 7 and 8 we roam all over Italy. To what extent does Varro's and Vitruvius’ revision impact on the wider territory? Do they equally belong to ‘Rome’? Where is the crisis in identity to which they respond? Is it about living and writing in the city or in the Empire?

The Empire put particular pressure on the urbs Roma. As other cities in Italy and beyond assumed the appearance of a Roman city, with bath-houses, fora, and images of the emperor, there was an increased urgency for Rome herself to state her primacy — and as entity as well as idea, a boundaried space that could withstand its expansion as it looked to engulf North Africa, Northern Europe, Syria … This had to be Rome as home, the same Rome as had been founded by Romulus and walled by Servius, a Rome which was exceptional and exclusive, despite its infiltration of other territories and their inhabitants’ infiltration of it. As Greek art was displayed in her temples and Egyptian obelisks in her squares, the capital began to look radically different, alien even — both from what she once was, and perhaps too, given the obelisks, from other Roman cities.Footnote ²² It needed a special language to claim that this Rome was stable.

Rome's cultural revolution does not just depend on Greece but on the Hellenistic East, and above all Egypt, and Egypt's own Greek culture, demanding that the ‘Hellenistic’ in ‘Greek culture’ accommodate the Alexandrian.Footnote ²³ It relies, as W.-H. acknowledges in his final section, on the relationship of Italy not only to Rome but to Rome's other territories. By the time we get to the Elder Pliny, Egypt and Britain were Roman too. Carthage had been Roman for longer. Cultural contact with North Africa needs separating out, but separating out as one strand interwoven with the others. As with research into the imperial cult, scholarship still studies ‘Romanization’ and ‘Hellenization’ in geographical pockets.Footnote ²⁴ It is one of the virtues of this book that it reveals the short-comings of such studies. But bringing the Greek world into Italy as W.-H. does is not enough. His insistence on triangulation and the presence of Favorinus from Arles at the opening of ch. 1 underline this. The Rome of Rome's Cultural Revolution raises wider expectations.

If ‘Rome’ is a provocation, so too is ‘culture’. Ultimately, the actors who enable W.-H. to define his shifting landscape turn out to be rather restricted in kind to builders, traders, and antiquarians, the same stars already cast by Rawson and discussed in the same constellations, ars by ars.Footnote ²⁵ Not that he does not lend considerable sophistication to the way in which we read their legacy, freeing Varro and Vitruvius from their ivory tower and turning them from nerds into ‘movers and shakers’. But where are the playwrights, the soldiers, the women? Not in the index, certainly. Where are questions of literacy or education? (Not in the index either.) Was it for nothing that Sallust cast Sempronia at the centre of his Catiline? Even freedmen rarely rate a mention (‘freedmen, rise of 37, 333, 355, 406’). Like Rawson's Intellectual Life, W.-H.'s ‘culture’ is owned by intellectuals.

The two largest cultural lacunae are literature and religion.Footnote ²⁶ Plautus gets two references in the index, Terence none. This is of a piece with the relative lack of iconographic analysis: this book sees itself as the sequel to Zanker's Hellenismus in Mittelitalien and not the prequel to The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus. Footnote ²⁷ But the wealth of research which has been done on the poetry of Catullus, Horace and the elegistsFootnote ²⁸ and its expression of anxieties about Roman identity at the end of the Republic would have provided excellent additional material, and not least because few Roman poets were actually born in Rome. It is with Ennius of Rudiae that W.-H. begins; and if Ennius points to the missed opportunity for engagement with poetry, Favorinus points to the missed opportunity of engagement with the broader definition of culture developed in recent work on the Second Sophistic.Footnote ²⁹

Religious culture in various forms (from temple-building to calendars to ritual) inevitably plays no small part in W.-H.'s book. But despite the rôle that Varro plays for him, he is little interested in religion as such, or in how radical religious change can be, not just practically, but theologically. The impact of the arrival in Rome at the end of the third century b.c.e. of the Phrygian Mother Goddess, Cybele (again not in W.-H.'s index), and her prominence in Augustan ideology, should not be under-estimated. Nor indeed should the ways in which the cults of existing gods collided with euergetism and with the imperial cult. Recognizing the deceased emperor as a god had a profound effect on the ways in which those living under Rome conceived of their identity.

W.-H. is a reluctant revolutionary. His preface first announces, ‘This book is about a transformation of Roman society, culture and identity’ (xix) before insisting that this is a book about the rôle of culture. ‘The claim is’ that cultural and political change ‘are so intimately connected that without its cultural components the political story is two-dimensional’ (xix). The ‘r’ word makes no appearance in the way that W.-H. sets up his questions in ch. 1, but at the end of that chapter he repeats that ‘the force of the central argument is to align cultural with political change’ (35): ‘What can be sustained is a cultural revolution exactly parallel to Syme's political one: the elite is challenged by groups immediately below and outside the elite, which successfully establish their claim to belong to a redefined elite’ (36). This statement is then immediately revisited and revised: ‘the social revolution threatened by the rise of freedmen is only partially contained: and the record of material-culture points to a spread of a cultural language that is all about assertion of status, to circles far beyond what can reasonably be described as an elite. It is perhaps here that the revolutionary impact of the new culture is most clearly seen’ (37). But freedmen (see above) appear only sporadically (but see below on 454). At this point, the language of revolution (except for the phrase ‘consumer revolution’ or to refer to French or American revolutions) is dropped until the epilogue.

W.-H. starts the epilogue with an exposition of Syme's Roman Revolution and repeats his claim that ‘much of the cultural change described in the present book can be mapped onto Syme's revolution’ (443). But he proceeds to insist that the cultural revolution is not a phenomenon restricted to the élite, and that ‘if culture is about the construction of identities … Roman identity must start with citizenship’ (443). This is the first, but for a passing reference, that we have heard of citizenship since the toga was identified as the dress of the citizen on p. 41 and Italian aims at the time of the Social War were revisited on p. 81. But now citizenship moves centre stage, and the Roman attitude to citizenship is made the mirror of Roman attitudes to their cultural identity. Italian enthusiasm for Hellenistic luxuries is intimately linked to their frustration at not being able to acquire status via Roman citizenship. W.-H. insists that the Social War itself only began a change in the political possibilities for the Italians, and accepts Syme's view that it was not until Augustus that they were able fully to establish a place in Roman politics. But he insists too that what triumphed was not the Italians within the traditional model of Roman citizenship, but a new model of citizenship, capable of progressive expansion. In this model, citizenship was a matter not of votes but of legal protection and above all of dignity.

All of this must be right, but W.-H. chooses not to tease out what might be considered the most crucial aspect of the transformation of Roman citizenship. Down to the 50s b.c.e. and the trial of Balbus, Romans insisted that one could not be a citizen of Rome and also a citizen elsewhere. From the end of the 40s and the Second Triumvirate we have evidence of dual citizenship.Footnote ³⁰ If Rome once thought that to be Roman was an exclusive political identity, whatever one's cultural identity, now to be Roman was but one political identity among others. Rome had ceased to be another city-state and had become a world empire to which many city-states belonged. One could be Roman almost whatever other identity one possessed. But if this was so, the staking of a claim to an identity was no longer a matter of politics — at least not of Roman politics. The citizen of the cosmopolis now negotiated his identity in quite other terms. The rich array of cultural knowledge and resources amassed in both material and intellectual terms that W.-H. charts in this book was now free to be deployed to quite new ends. The history of Roman culture, even what it might mean to talk of Roman culture, has been transformed.

What about the book's take home message? Rome's Cultural Revolution charts in great detail a whole host of ways in which the culture of Rome and Italy was transformed during the Middle and Late Republic. It then moves in the epilogue to turn these transformations into a revolution by injecting there the politics eschewed up to that point — even a revolution of which Marx might have approved. On the penultimate page W.-H. writes: ‘The symbolic and cultural manifestations of citizen identity grew in importance as the functional link with the operations of the city-state was lost’ (453). In his penultimate sentence he remarks that ‘The freedmen vicomagistri of Rome … are a useful symbol of the participation of the freedman in Roman cultural identity’ (454). This final conclusion stresses not cultural change but the way Roman culture was not élite culture, however hierarchical Roman society might be. If the choice of telling anecdote earlier in the book has reminded us of the W.-H. who gave us Suetonius: a Scholar and his Caesars, this conclusion reminds us of the W.-H. who gave us Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Only W.-H. has the breadth of expertise to have written this book. And there is nothing else like it. Its wealth of evidence will keep scholars returning to it. But it is left to the reader to work out how the various cultural changes which it identifies interact with the political agenda which it introduces so late in its narrative. This is all the more difficult because W.-H. retreats from the world which this cultural revolution created. Although Augustus is very present in the chapter on the city of Rome (how could he not be?), he is only fleetingly present in the rest of the account. Indeed, it is as if Augustus’ own aims and actions were too well known to be interrogated, as if Syme and Zanker have had the last word. Augustus is not only the turning point but also the end point.

Although occasionally plundering the Principate for anecdotal tit-bits, filched as if all from the same table, W.-H. refuses post-Augustan culture much consideration. In consequence we are left unclear as to how anyone negotiated their identities or exploited the power offered by cultural knowledge in the world after the revolution. Seneca lived in a different world from Varro or Cicero, Frontinus in a different world from Vitruvius. For an analysis of revolution to work one has to understand what was affected. It is the achievement of this book to make the reader realize what an account that did justice to the revolution in the culture of Rome would have to look like. It is now over to others to bring us the analysis of the Roman imperial culture which stands behind all subsequent Western history.