This crop of books features, inter alia, a real blockbuster, the Roman Guy Fawkes, a host of bishops, and the welcome appearance of some Roman women. The under-representation of women as writers of Roman history has been something I noted in previous reviews; the under-representation of women in Roman history is scarcely news, meanwhile. However, this review includes no fewer than three biographies of Roman women, only one of whom was an empress (who could be considered the ‘usual suspects’).Footnote ¹

Gillian Clark's account of Augustine's mother, Monica,Footnote ² is tellingly subtitled ‘An ordinary saint’. It is of course very rare for us to know so much about such an ‘ordinary’ woman, and the fact that we do is due to the fact that she was mother of such an extraordinary son. Augustine gives vivid snapshots of his mother, most vividly of course in his unique Confessions, as well as in his early dialogues, where she appears as an intelligent and curious, if unschooled, participant. That the Monica written by Augustine is very much a partial literary construction is not something that Clark shies away from; nor does she hide the less palatable (to us) aspects of Augustine's picture of Monica and his views on women in general. Meanwhile, Clark builds up her picture of Monica and other ‘ordinary’ women of Late Antiquity with the command of a wide range of sources. It is the very real skill of this biographer to bring Monica to life with great intellectual sympathy in a subtle and deeply humane book which taught me new things about Monica, Augustine, and indeed the society and culture of Late Antiquity in which women, no less than men, played an integral part.

The next subject in question is in fact nameless: the Turia of the titleFootnote ³ is rather ‘Turia’, the anonymous recipient of a lengthy epitaph from the very last years of the Roman Republic, long known as the Laudatio Turiae. It is indeed a unique and endlessly fascinating text and provides a stimulating basis for this monograph, which successfully uses the case of ‘Turia’ to unravel key themes and questions in the turbulent political history of the last years of the Republic, as well as in the history of Roman women in the period. Both the epitaph and Osgood's analysis manage to humanize both the political conflict and the legal history (which study of the epitaph has often tended to focus on) involved. An added bonus of this volume is the illustrated discussion of the monumentality of the laudatio and related inscriptions and tomb monuments, which many readers, including students, will find invaluable; useful too is the presentation of the text and translation as an appendix. The fact remains, of course, that the actual lived history of even elite Roman women is difficult to extract from the so-often exemplary discourses that we have to work with.

Empresses are of course the ancient Roman women who were the most likely to receive detailed attention from writers both ancient and modern. Unlike Monica and Turia, the empress Galla Placidia has in fact received her second biography in four years.Footnote ⁴ The life story of Galla Placidia is indeed a gripping one and the historical background of turmoil and change is fascinating. A cast of characters including Augustine and Attila the Hun adds to the picture. Salisbury takes us through the life cycle of Galla Placidia as well as using her as the focus to examine the period and its transformations. The narrative is readable and doubtless there are many who will find this a useful introduction to the period and a fascinating account of an empress who led an unusually dramatic life. While Salisbury generally does well to elucidate the key political and religious themes of the period the expert reader is a little frustrated by her frequent reluctance to probe beneath the surface and build upon the nuances established by recent studies of the period, relying rather on the broad strokes of what is at times a rather dated picture. It is unfortunate that the book cover claims the striking ‘Brescia medallion’ to be a portrait of Galla Placidia and her children, when it is widely acknowledged to be nothing of the sort.

The final subject of a ‘life’ in this crop, in quite some contrast to the pious empress, is, according to Barbara Levick, the Roman ‘equivalent of Britain's Guy Fawkes’ (xi).Footnote ⁵ She goes on to compare the case of Lucius Sergius Catilina with a detective story: intriguing and problematic in equal measure. This is very much a book aimed at students, and will be very useful as such. In a highly judicious and concise account, the complex issues of the Late Republic are dealt with clearly and the problems of the sources are laid out with exemplary carefulness. This is certainly not an account which allows us to take Cicero or Sallust at face value. The bigger picture is expertly laid out and underlying the whole is a persuasive argument:

Therefore, neither Cicero nor Catilina can be easily cast as hero or villain. We are wisely reminded not to be taken in by the supposed virtues of the Roman Republic but to remember the price of power, a theme to which we shall shortly return.

However, having considered four individual lives, we can now turn to a book which uses the form of collective biography in order to retell the story of the rise of Christianity in Late Antiquity from a new angle.Footnote ⁶ This lively and readable study looks at the ‘last pagan generation’, focusing on Ausonius, Vettius Agorius Praetextatus, Libanius, and Themistius. The driving conceit of Watts's book is that, while later scholars and students have tended to assume that the writing was there on the wall for the traditional religion of Rome in the late fourth century, it did not necessarily feel that way at the time. Watts's generation were not zealous ‘pagans’ but rather ‘the last Romans to grow up in a world that simply could not imagine a Roman world dominated by a Christian majority’ (6). Watts weaves the stories of his gang of four elegantly into his narrative, with the sequential focus taking us from childhood to old age working well. There are areas of interpretation that might be questioned: for example, was the hardening religious climate really so unforeseeable for these men? And, as with Alan Cameron's magisterial Last Pagans,Footnote ⁷ one might again query why the pagans of our concern always have to be elite (even super-elite) men. Nonetheless, this is an attractive account that puts something of a new spin on a familiar story.

A fascinatingly different approach to the religious changes of the period is to be found in Ville Vuolanto's study of children and asceticism.Footnote ⁸ Scholarship on children is a rapidly growing field and this account certainly provides a new perspective on the important late antique development of asceticism. The central paradox here is, of course, that the ideology of asceticism was hostile to people having children while at the same time being dependent on these people's children for the fostering and continuity of ascetic institutions. Ascetic texts from Late Antiquity seem at first unpromising ground for historians of the family, although they provide plenty of striking moments. Note in particular Jerome's advice on responding to your family should they beg you not to leave: you should trample your father under foot as he lies on the threshold (Jerome, Ep. 14.2). Vuolanto's study looks at the interaction between familial strategies and the growth of asceticism in Late Antiquity, using a wide range of literary sources and approaches from the study of family history. The result is an innovative book that certainly brings something new to the history of asceticism.

The development of the papacy in Late Antiquity is another key theme in the study of the period, and recent work has done much to transform our views of the field. Dunn's edited volumeFootnote ⁹ shows its involvement in ongoing debates, not least by its title: that is, that it is not called The Pope in Late Antiquity. One of the challenges of studying the late antique sources related to the bishopric of Rome is avoiding the temptation to view them in teleological perspective and this is a temptation that the papers here avoid admirably. Unusually for a collection of conference papers, the essays are generally clear and relatively accessible to those whose expertise in the field is not extensive. While accessible English translations of many of the key sources involved are few and far between, the translations provided here will be welcomed by students in particular. The realities and challenges of episcopal authority are well brought out by the various scholars. While more attention to cross-referencing would have produced a more fully rounded volume, this collection does provide a stimulating snapshot of ongoing work that will undoubtedly encourage future research.

Late antique bishops are just some of the characters to appear on the move in an edited volume which reflects upon the ‘spatial turn’ that has had a great influence on studies of architecture and topography and, as particularly relevant here, their interaction with ancient history.Footnote ¹⁰ The papers consider different aspects of urban movement, of the interaction of people and place in the cityscape of Rome from the Republic to Late Antiquity. This allows for a range of approaches from literary scholars, archaeologists, and ancient historians of varying interests. We consider, inter alia, the Roman male elite going about with their entourages as part of ‘visualized hierarchies’ (10), aristocratic virgins who, according to ascetic discourse, were not supposed to move about at all, and members of all classes participating in religious processions. The transition to Late Antiquity is productive of a number of papers looking at how new patterns of ritual movement structured and gave new layers of meaning to the topography of the city and its significance for city dwellers and visitors. Cultural memory is a pertinent concept here and is one of several which could have benefited from more sustained attention. There are eighteen rather short chapters and, as so often, the book would have benefited from perhaps fewer but longer, more developed papers. It is also worth noting that cross-referencing across papers would have made for a richer volume (this would undoubtedly have been aided by the use of footnotes, rather than endnotes, which are not really appropriate in a publication of this kind). Nonetheless, this is a fascinating volume to dip into, and strongly indicative of a range of interesting interdisciplinary work going on in the study of the city of Rome.

To return to a topic that might well be more familiar to readers of the Roman history subject review, the story of the ‘Roman revolution’ has been told many times; Richard Alston's new account is part of a series called ‘Ancient Warfare and Civilization’, which, according to the front matter, offers ‘compelling new narratives of the armed conflicts that shaped and reshaped the classical world’.Footnote ¹¹ The angle of this particular retelling is a concentration on the violence of this revolution, an exposure of the real cost of the so-called Augustan settlement. While no scholar of Roman history can be unaware of this, Alston does provide a lively account which provides a useful corrective to the often more gung-ho narrative histories on offer. The bloody trail of violence of these years, the human cost both to Romans and their conquests, is exposed vividly throughout this work. It is a book to recommend to students or interested general readers rather than a monograph offering new interpretations. Nonetheless, I found Alston's focus on networks persuasive, a useful alternative to a long-rejected institutional approach to the ‘Roman revolution”. The author is surely right to stress the role of ‘a patrimonial network that came to dominate all aspects of political life. It was this network, not exactly an institution, not exactly an insurgent group, but a significant political force nonetheless, that drove Rome's revolution’ (335–6).

Finally we come to a true blockbuster account of Roman history.Footnote ¹² In 544 pages, Mary Beard seeks to explain – to what will surely be a vast audience – what enabled the rise of Rome, what this phenomenon was like in reality for a wide range of types of people, and why we should care. As will be expected, this is a lively and hugely engaging account of Rome to 211 ce which does not talk down to a general audience but takes the view that traditional and clichéd views should be questioned even in popular works of history. As such, the story begins not at the beginning but by plunging the reader straight into 63 bce and the Catilinarian ‘crisis’. Beard argues that it is only from the first century bce that we can really explore Rome ‘close up and in vivid detail’ (22). Nonetheless, we are then returned to the beginning, though we are reminded of the impossibility of settling on any single story for the ‘birth of Rome’. Archaeological evidence is nicely elucidated alongside the literary sources throughout, as we move from the intriguing early inscription reading RECEI, which provides confirmation of some kind of kingship at Rome, to the tomb of Scipios, which brings us to what Beard calls in her chapter heading ‘Rome's great leap forward’. This engaging account of Rome's rise and the conflict this involved sweeps us along up to the death of Caesar, when we take a pause at the moment of great transition. Beard's point here is that a linear account will not suit the breadth of the Roman Empire. Hence, after a chapter on Augustus (Beard freely admits a number of questions remain, not least, ‘How far was he simply lucky to have survived so long?’ [384]), we get all fourteen emperors up to 211 ce covered in one chapter. This is a wise choice, and the broader canvas that is stretched at this point produces a properly innovative popular history book. As Beard asks, ‘How much difference, and to whom, did the qualities of the man on the throne make?’ (400), which does not mean that she does not explore a number of fascinating anecdotes about Roman imperial behaviour. (In the interest of disclosure, I will admit that I first came across many of these in a class on Roman emperors taught by Beard herself some twenty years ago.) We next move to the ‘haves and have-nots’, making it clear that the non-elite was not an undifferentiated mass, as Beard elucidates a world of popular culture as well as one of crime and poverty. The final chapter looks at Rome outside Rome and here a number of themes from the book are tied together. Beard argues that in the Roman Empire of the second century ce we can see the co-existence of seemingly incompatible visions of empire, both consolidation and expansion: ‘In practice…the empire of the first two centuries ce became less a field of conquest and pacification and more a territory to be managed, policed and taxed’ (487). In contrast to traditional narratives, she lays out the social and cultural world of the provinces of the Roman Empire as one of bottom-up rather than top-down change, of hybridity rather than straightforward ‘Romanization’. It is the material evidence that is the most striking here, notably the evidence of the scale of the Roman supply chain from ‘Mons Claudianus’ in the Egyptian desert, and the multicultural inscriptions from Hadrian's Wall, most poignantly that composed by Barates from Palmyra for his wife, Regina. Beard says that to write Roman history ‘demands a particular sort of imagination’ which is ‘rather like walking on a tightrope, a very careful balancing act’ (19): while lots seems familiar much more is alien. In this account, she walks the tightrope with aplomb. It is a joy to read a work aimed at a general audience which does not shy away from the complexities, absurdities, and difficulties of Roman history, as well as the complexities of the relationship of this history with our own present.