Peter Wiseman has returned to the accustomed and much appreciated format that he has made his own, namely the short insightful book, composed of a variety of interlocking chapters that offer accomplished variations on a theme. His investigations span history, literature, archaeology, and most notably the politics and culture of ordinary Roman citizens. Only one chapter has been published before, with the result that this book is essentially all new. With deep learning and dazzling new insights, while writing in a highly readable and entertaining prose style, W. recovers lost episodes and readings from Republican Rome, even as he revisits some of the most famous events in late Republican history with an enthusiasm and gusto that is the hallmark of his scholarship.

The purpose of Remembering the Roman People is to recover and to (re)construct a picture of late Republican Roman political life from the point of view of popular politics, in other words the particular and personal story of the Roman People, especially the plebs. W. represents this as a rediscovery of history from a specific ideological perspective, a history that acknowledges and celebrates its own partisan interpretations. He reads the term res publica, whether it refers to the political community of the Romans or to their characteristic Republican constitution, as originally having been res populica, which is to say the ‘possession of the ordinary people’.

This book is clearly partly inspired by the influential and much debated work of Fergus Millar (to whom W. has dedicated this volume) about the degree of popular participation in Roman politics. Millar has argued that students of Roman history should take far more seriously both the formal powers and practical influence of ordinary voters in the Roman political process. W.'s chapters go in very different directions: they are more concerned with telling the historical story from the point of view of popular politics than in describing how the mechanics of political decision making worked in practice. In some ways, in fact, his discussion is at odds with Millar's forceful insistence on the power of the people. In this book the voices and votes of ordinary citizens did have influence and their own significance but were repeatedly either drowned out or superseded by the often-oppressive politics practised by the nobiles, members of Rome's traditional office-holding families.

W. sets himself the fascinating task of recovering some of these lost voices and stories that might represent an alternative ‘history of the Roman people’. Consequently, an important premise of W.'s work is that the familiar account of Roman history contains both distortions and omissions because it has been written by and for the élite senators, who supported the political agenda and methods of the so-called optimates. In other words, one partisan version of Roman history is seen to deserve and perhaps even to require another as a kind of necessary response. W.'s version is novel and thought-provoking, even as it contains its own biases and partialities. Inevitably, a history that stresses the repeated resistance of the plebeians to oppression by political élites will not be looking for examples of dialogue or of shared narratives between mass and élite.

The ten chapters (of rather unequal length) circle around a series of central topics and leading individuals, as they progress from the obscure to the familiar and eventually the notorious. W.'s scrupulously detailed readings of individual episodes are often brilliant examples of the best of old-fashioned scholarship combined with a bold and fearless use of historical imagination to construct hypothetical readings. The most important foci are the following: the historian and popular tribune Licinius Macer and the temples of Juno Moneta and Veiovis on the Capitoline hill; M. Terentius Varro and the astonishing range of his literary pursuits situated in the context of his popular political ideology; the urban setting for political activity in the Forum and on the Capitol in Rome; the way the Roman people thought land had been divided in the early days of their city; the career and writings of C. Asinius Pollio in the transition from republic to empire; and the range of ways to understand and interpret the murder of popular politicians from the death of Tiberius Gracchus in 133 b.c. to the murder of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March in 44 b.c. Perhaps the most innovative contribution is in the second chapter, which seeks to recover the political career of Gaius Licinius Geta (consul in 116 b.c. and again in 108 b.c.), whose sudden reversals of fortune shed new light on the fierce struggles for political power in Rome of the late second century b.c.

Different readers are likely to have their own disagreements with various of the more controversial and hypothetical new readings. For example, W. accepts Pier Luigi Tucci's 2005 argument in JRA that the temple of Juno Moneta was moved in the 80s b.c. from a location in the garden of the Aracoeli Church to a position on top of the Tabularium on the Capitoline hill overlooking the Roman Forum. Such a move would have been highly unusual, especially at a time period when there is ample evidence that after the fire of 83 b.c. the great Capitoline temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva was being scrupulously rebuilt on exactly the same footprint for religious reasons. If there is indeed evidence that indicates that the temple of Juno Moneta was on top of the Tabularium, then why could it not have been in this same location before the Tabularium was built? At the end of the day we are faced with a situation in which our ancient sources tell us of many temples on the Capitoline hill but we do not know the locations of the majority of them.

Similarly, it is hard for this reader to agree with W.'s complete rejection (185–7) of Jerzy Linderski's interpretation in Athenaeum 90 (2002) of Tiberius Gracchus’ killing as a consecratio performed by Scipio Nasica, the pontifex maximus. W.'s principal argument is that we should not accept a religious explanation for Tiberius’ death because it is not found in Cicero's writings. Such an argument from silence does not do justice to the highly intricate and technical details of Linderski's position, which itself consists of a remarkable tour de force in classical scholarship and historical imagination.

In the context of popular culture in Rome, it is surprising to find no mention made of a related study that will surely be of interest to readers who enjoy this book, namely Nicholas Horsfall's The Culture of the Roman Plebs (Duckworth, 2003, first published in Italian in 1996), which conjures up a world of popular memory and culture, much of it based on musical composition and performance. It would also have been relevant to cite the most detailed modern discussion of the aftermath of the Ides of March, that by Ulrich Gotter in his thought-provoking book Der Diktator ist Tot! Politik in Rom zwischen den Iden des März und der Begründung des Zweiten Triumvirats (1996).

W. has once again demonstrated the essential usefulness of two of the most traditional tools in Roman history: close attention to chronology and careful analysis of family relationships (prosopography). His discussion shows how much new and surprising information can be gleaned from the study of small references and minor episodes, especially when these come as ‘asides’ to the main narrative of an ancient author, background information that may be less subject to bias and distortion than the main narrative. W. offers what to this reader is a very welcome critique of Cicero as a commentator who has inevitably tended to dominate our view of late Republican politics. Much new light is shed here on the historian Licinius Macer, the politician Asinius Pollio, and especially on Varro, the polymath who also emerges as a true man of the people. Above all, this book offers a fine demonstration of how much can be learned from detailed and careful attention to the full range of available ancient evidence about a given event or person, including literary texts in both prose and poetry, the urban landscape, coins, art and archaeology, epigraphical texts, insights from the study of demography and family connections, and the implications of political ideology. All students of the Roman Republic will profit from the quality of scholarship in this volume, as well as from the whole concept of imagining a fresh perspective on a well-known historical period.