The imperium romanum was a curious entity. From a city that acquired an empire, it developed into an empire that wanted to be, or at least, desired to present itself as, a city — but it could also be imagined, and, over time, increasingly was imagined, as a ‘nation’ (patria), or a (Christian) oikoumenē, as Claudia Rapp and Hal Drake argue in their introduction to The City in the Classical and Post-Classical World. During the fourth century c.e., as Bryan Ward-Perkins, a contributor to their volume, notes, the empire became a stranger beast still, effectively ‘losing’ its imperial centre for the better part of a century, as emperors spent almost all of their time with their armies on or near the Rhine-Danube and Mesopotamian frontiers. Yet the empire proved resilient, enduring for centuries. Both books under review here in effect contribute to the ongoing debate concerning the cause(s) of Rome's remarkable imperial longevity.

John Nicols’ study of civic patronage offers a perfect illustration of the fact that it was not just ideologically plausible to view the empire as one big city (for example, Aristides, Roman Oration 36), but that civic structures and institutions did actually dominate the day-to-day operation of the Roman empire to an extraordinary degree. Roman personal patronage (patrocinium) originated in the citizen-community of the Roman civitas, but during the Republic it was adapted into an instrument that could also be used to regulate relationships between powerful Romans and outside communities. Patronage of a community (patrocinium publicum) could be achieved by the successful Roman general who had accepted a defeated foreign state into alliance (this was mos maiorum according to Cicero, Off. 1.35; but some scholars doubt whether such ‘patronage through conquest’ has much basis in fact, see, for example, Claude Eilers, Roman Patrons of Greek Cities (2002), with the review by Koenraad Verboven, BMCR 2003.06.19), but was also ascribed more informally to leading Roman politicians with clientes among provincial élites, whose communities were then assumed to be part of the Roman patron's clientela as well. In addition to this, from the late Republic onwards we have evidence for a more formal procedure of initiating a patron-client relationship between an individual Roman and a civic community, in the form of (references to) so-called tabulae patronatus: that is, contracts/agreements in which the formal co-optation of a member of the Roman élite as patron by a civic community through a decree of its city council is recorded. Acceptance of the city's offer by the prospective patron meant that he (or, occasionally, she; see 255–7) officially ‘received the community into his/her fides clientelaque’ (4).

N.'s main thesis is that from the late Republic onwards, civic patronage provided the Romans with an important instrument to manage their empire, and that particularly in the Latin West (the primary focus of his study) civic patronage contributed to urbanization and functioned as a vehicle for Romanization (which N. accepts as an unproblematic term), chiefly through the benefactions patrons conferred upon their client-communities (contributions to civic amenities, but also legal representation and administrative services; see 257–73). Contra Eilers, N. does not think that civic patronage declined under the Empire. Instead, he detects a broadening of the social profile of patrons, as equestrians and decuriones became increasingly involved in addition to senators.

A great merit of N.'s study is that he thoroughly exploits all the different categories of evidence for civic patronage. Thus we have chapters on ‘Civic Patronage in the Late Republic’ (focusing inter alia on Caesar's and Pompey's clientelae), ‘Civic Patronage in the Verrines’ and ‘Civic Patronage in the Principate’ (discussing inter alia Pliny the Younger and Fronto) that are mainly based on literary sources, a chapter on ‘Civic Patronage in Roman Law’, and chapters on ‘Augustus and Civic Patronage’, ‘Civic Patronage in the Epigraphical Record’ and ‘Patronage and the Patrons of Canusium’ (a case study of the famous album of the city's council), that chiefly employ epigraphic evidence (N.'s epigraphical database can be found online at https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/13015). The result is a very comprehensive study of civic patronage in the Roman West, in which, in addition to the book's main thesis, many interesting observations are made along the way. See for instance N.'s remarks on the benefits cities derived from having multiple patrons (if carefully managed), in his chapters on the late Republic and the Principate, and his explanation of the vagueness inscriptions often display with regard to patronal benefactions: both city and patron had an incentive to present the relationship as continuous and based on mutual trust and affection rather than on (the prospect of) mutual gain, and so were loath to draw up a ‘balance-sheet’ of gifts and counter-gifts; moreover, the status of civic patron was prestigious, so cities tried to avoid the suggestion that it could be had for a specific price (i.e. a particular type of gift). However, in reality most patrons were, or became, benefactors of their client-cities, but, and this is important, not all city-benefactors necessarily were civic patrons: honorific inscriptions commemorating benefactions often do not specify whether the honorand was also a patron of the town, perhaps for the reasons just stated. He or she might be, but, as N. notes (9–10), if so then we are most likely to learn about this from another text, for example, a funerary inscription listing all the titles of the deceased. Thus, we should not automatically assume civic benefactors also to be formal patrons of the cities that received their gifts.

These are very sensible points, on which I agree with N., and therefore I do not really understand why he feels the need to refer to public benefactions to cities as another, more informal type of ‘civic patronage’ next to the more formal, official type (patrocinium publicum) that he focuses on in his book, as he does on several occasions (for example, 6, 17, 273). Surely it would be much less confusing (and would naturally follow from N.'s own analysis) to refer to public benefactions towards cities as (civic) munificence or euergetism, and reserve the term ‘civic patronage’ for those cases where we know that an individual had been formally co-opted as a patron. (I should note in passing that, despite N.'s repeated claims to the contrary, for example 6 n. 20, 273, in my own work on civic munificence in Roman Asia Minor I never once use the term ‘civic patronage’ to refer to the benefactions concerned.) Such formally co-opted patrons might engage in civic munificence as well, but, as N. shows, they need not necessarily do this, concentrating on other services instead (such as defending the interests of their client-communities at Rome).

If civic patronage, that is patrocinium publicum, was, as N. argues, one way of tying the many cities and communities of the Roman world together into one imperial network, and of turning subjects into citizens, then ideology, working through and finding expression in institutions, was another, providing people with models of belonging. This is the theme of the excellent collection edited by Rapp and Drake. The city, both as a physical entity and as an ideal, was instrumental to the long drawn-out transformation of the ancient world from polis to imperium to oikoumenē, as they outline in their introduction. Yet it was from early on confronted by another ideal, that of universal empire. Both models, city and imperium, of course predate the Roman Empire, and therefore the collection justifiably starts with two ‘pre-Roman’ chapters: one by Josine Blok, in which she outlines how from the beginning, the Classical Greek polis was more than just a citizen-community, it was also and primarily ‘a covenant between gods and men’ (14) to which its members belonged through participation in the fulfillment of the community's obligations towards the gods, and one by Rolf Strootman in which, focusing on the ancient Near East and the Hellenistic period, he shows how a universalizing tendency (that is, the idea of world empire) was a common characteristic of pre-modern imperial ideology.

The Roman Empire would inherit both ideals, and would eventually manage to blend them together into a third, that of oikoumenē, a notion that also already existed, but arguably gained particular currency in the later Empire, when the emperor was ideologically reconfigured as the protector of the ‘whole (Christian) world’, as Drake argues in his chapter on late antique ‘topographies of power’. Before that and well into Late Antiquity, however, the city proved an extraordinarily durable model of belonging and socio-political organization, even in a ‘world empire’, as Jill Harries and Caroline Humfress demonstrate in their fascinating analyses of how Roman law, originating in the world of the civitas, was slowly adapted to the realities of empire. This could only be achieved, however, by re-conceptualizing the empire as a universal citizen-community, and by effectively turning subjects into citizens. As Claudia Moatti shows, Roman law was indeed re-interpreted as a framework that could facilitate and accommodate the ceaseless mobility of individuals between communities in the ‘empire-wide polis’, allowing people to adopt multiple legal personae and identities depending on local context, a development she calls ‘cosmopolitization’ (130).

Such processes of integration resulted, as Ward-Perkins argues, in an empire that, during the fourth century, was ‘centre-less’ but could nonetheless count on the intense and powerful loyalty of its erstwhile subjects, for whom the imperium had in effect become a ‘nation’. How the ‘civic model’ also shaped the transition towards Christianity is highlighted in the contributions of Claudia Rapp and Susanna Elm. Rapp shows how the polis and its discourse provided an inspirational model for the two quintessential Christian institutions, church (ekklēsia) and monastery, while Elm analyses the work of Gregory of Nazianzus to show how civic topography could be re-imagined to facilitate the transition to a ‘Roman Greek Christian polis’ (167). In Rome, the bishop played a crucial rôle in the city's transition to a fully Christian civitas, as Michele Renee Salzman argues, through a manipulation of civic ritual in the decades after the city's sack in 410, ritual that served to emphasize the city's (and its bishop's) rôle at the head of Latin Christianity. Christianity's complete reconceptualization, not just of the city but of the empire as whole, Emily Albu argues, found its material embodiment in the production of Christian world maps which, unlike the traditional Roman itineraries, did not portray the world as a network of poleis connected by Roman roads, but as a vast Christian space, ruled by a single God. The volume ends with an afterword by Clifford Ando, offering some interesting reflections on cities, citizenship and empire.

Two important issues, I think, are missing or do not receive as much attention as they should have in this otherwise fine volume, and they might be suggested as avenues for further research. The first is violence, or predation by the imperial government and its agents (highlighted by Peter Bang as a crucial aspect of Roman rule), and its effects on the relationship between rulers and ruled and on the development of imperial ideology. The second is state formation. The patronage-networks analysed by N. and the ideological and institutional developments described in the Rapp and Drake volume arguably might be viewed as part of one single and, comparatively speaking, peculiar process of state formation, that gave rise to this most peculiar empire.