It may be said at the outset that reviewing The Roman Government of Britain is a somewhat daunting experience. Nobody, apart from Birley himself, has such expertise in the arcane science of Roman imperial prosopography combined with complete familiarity with the historical sources for the province of Britannia. Nobody living, that is, and here it is fitting to record that The Roman Government is dedicated by its author to his father, Eric Birley, just as was its predecessor, The Fasti of Roman Britain (Reference Birley1981), of which the present work is really an expansion and revision. The mantle of the father has descended to the son.

The Roman Government of Britain is divided chronologically into four sections. Part One deals with senatorial officials in the period when Britannia formed a single province before its division into a northern and southern command (Britannia Inferior and Britannia Superior) in the early third century. This section is subdivided into two parts, the first (subsections I.1–I.12) dealing with officers and officials of senatorial rank and the second with those drawn from the equestrian order. Looking at the senators first, we start, as is proper, with the most important of these, the senatorial governors of the province (I.2–I.6), of whom some forty or so are known for this period. Birley discusses the origins and careers of these men prior to their posting to Britain, their future careers, if any, and, of course, their activities while in post. He thus provides what is virtually a history of the first 170 years of the province of Britannia, but a history told very much from the Roman point of view.

Of the governors, the careers of ten – a quarter of the total – were recently discussed at length by this reviewer in ‘Footnotes to the Fasti’ (Schellenberg et al Reference Schellenberg, Hirschmann and Krieckhaus2008), to which the dedicated reader is referred. From the governors of the undivided province, Birley turns (I.8) to another group of distinguished Roman senators, the staff officers (comites) who accompanied emperors such as Claudius, Hadrian and Septimius Severus on imperial expeditions to the island. Of these, some sixteen are known, and, as one would expect, they include praetorian prefects such as Aemilius Papinianus. Among them too was the historian Suetonius, who was Hadrian’s ‘correspondence secretary’ (ab epistulis). Next (I.9 and I.10) come the legionary legates (including the future Emperor Vespasian, legate of Legion II in ad 43), prefaced by a section on the legionary bases. The discovery of a tombstone of a veteran of that same Legion II at the site of Alchester in Oxfordshire (Britannia, 36, 474 n 4) after the publication of The Roman Government has already made a re-examination of the whereabouts of the earliest legionary bases under Aulus Plautius necessary. As with the first- and second-century governors, some forty legionary legates are known, but whereas the role of governors in this period is almost complete, given the presence of three or four legions in the province, there will have been many more legates, and it can be predicted that the names of fresh members of the group, estimated as some 180 over the period (p 277), will turn up. Section I.11 deals with high-ranking iuridici – some five are known – and Birley suggests that these were only appointed to take over the judicial functions of the governor when that officer was engaged in military activity and too busy to deal with his judicial functions in person. The iuridici were all high-ranking senior senators. In contrast the next group considered, the tribuni laticlavii – ‘broad stripe’ or senatorial tribunes – appointed at the rate of one per legion, were young men at the very beginning of their careers in the imperial service. The group included the future Emperor Titus, possibly serving in Legio IX Hispana.

Sections I.13–I.16 cover equestrian officials and the equestrian career structure (I.13). The most important position was that of procurator (I.14), the official in charge of the financial affairs of the province. Fourteen were known, including the famous Julius Classicianus, who was sent to Britain in the aftermath of the Boudiccan revolt. The remaining sections in Part One are devoted to the few praefects of the Classis Britannica attested by name and lesser equestrian officials who performed a variety of functions, such as supervising the census at local level. Excluded are the equestrian tribuni angusticlavii – ‘narrow stripe’ tribunes – appointed at the rate of five per legion, and the praefecti and tribuni, commanding auxiliary regiments, presumably because too many of them are known. Might we hope that Birley will yet give us a monograph updating the work of Devijver’s The Equestrian Officers of the Roman Army (Reference Devijver1989–92), but limited to those who served in the province?

Part Two is devoted to the period from the accession of the Emperor Caracalla in 211 to the death of the Emperor Carinus in 285, a period in which Britain was divided into an Upper (southern) and a Lower (northern) Province. Birley discusses the division of Britain (II.1) and then turns his attention to senatorial governors and legionary legates (II.2). In a period of three-quarters of a century, sixteen governors of Inferior are known, compared with only four of Superior, even though the latter outranked the former. The reason for this anomaly is the greater wealth of Roman inscriptions from the northern province, especially from Hadrian’s Wall. As it is, finds of inscriptions become increasingly rare in the course of the third century and virtually come to an end in the fourth. Thus Parts Three and Four, which deal respectively with the usurpation of Carausius and Allectus (286–96) and with the last century of Roman rule, draw almost exclusively on documentary sources, such as the imperial panegyrics, the history of Ammianus Marcellinus and, most notably, the Notitia Dignitatum.

Until the reforms of Diocletian in the early fourth century, the governors of the province of Britannia, or the two provinces into which it was divided, acted as both the supreme military commander in their respective areas and the highest administrative and judicial official. From Diocletian onwards there was separation between the civil and the military. For the former there was the vicarius acting as the deputy of an official known as the Prefect of the Gauls – an area that, despite its name, included Britain. Beneath the vicarius were the governors of the four (later five) provinces into which the ‘diocese’ of Britain was divided. The military functions of the early governors were inherited by three officials: the Duke of the Britons, in charge of the forts and garrisons of Hadrian’s Wall and the northern frontier zone; the Count of the Saxon Shore, in charge of the coastal defences of southern and south-eastern Britain; and the Count of the Britons, in charge of a small mobile field army. In other words, by the end of the fourth century, six officials carried out the civil functions of a first-century governor of the province and three his military ones. Accordingly, we should expect to find a proliferation of named holders of the relevant offices, but, in fact, only a handful are known (pp 405–60). They include half a dozen vicarii, all attested by literary or documentary sources, and the same number of governors of the sub-provinces into which the command of the vicarii was divided – four from literary or documentary sources but two from inscriptions. The latter includes Lucius Septimius, governor of Britannia Prima under the Emperor Julian (361–3), who made a dedication at Cirencester. Only a few dukes are known, all from literary sources, including Fullofaudes who was circumventus – ‘outflanked’ or ‘ambushed’? – during the ‘Barbarian Conspiracy’ of 367 (Ammianus xxvii, 8.1), in the course of which Nectaridus, his colleague, the only named commander of the Shore defences, was killed. The position of Count of the Britons was probably instituted at the very end of the fourth century and none of the regular holders of this office are known at all, although commanders of ad hoc imperial expeditions to the island, also known as comites, are mentioned at an earlier date.

There is much more in Parts Two to Four than the mere listing of officials and a rehearsal of what is known about their origins and careers, so that in effect the narrative account of the Roman involvement in Britain provided by the detailed examination of the forty governors of the high empire given in Part One is continued and, indeed, brought to a conclusion in Part Four, Section V, ‘The end of Roman rule’. An appendix covers the rulers of British ‘client kingdoms’, a feature of the first years of Roman Britannia, and acts as a reprise to the early sections of Part One. A select bibliography and glossary are provided.

In sum, Birley has fulfilled the claim made at the outset to have produced ‘a kind of handbook or narrative history of Britain under Roman rule, more fully documented than anything now available’. He does not bring in the evidence of archaeology, for which he refers to the ‘incomparable History of Roman Britain by Sheppard Frere’, which does integrate history and archaeology. Thus he does not deal with ‘urban and agricultural development, economy and religion’, nor, one could add, with art. Neither does he look at the history of the island during the Roman period from the point of all those other ‘communities’ – civil and rural – who lived in the province. Even discussion of the Roman military/administrative community as a whole is omitted, so that the famous Vindolanda documents are employed only in the service of the prosopography of the governors at the time, rather than as a vital source of information about the Roman military in their own right (for which see, for example, Reference BirleyBirley 2002). As it happens the story of these three very different ‘communities’ is the subject of another massive work – David Mattingly’s An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman Empire (Reference Mattingly2006) – which, in some respects, is the perfect complement to The Roman Government of Britain. Yet within its self-imposed limits, Roman Government achieves all that it has set out to do. And it seems fair to say that, although new evidence in the form of inscriptions will inevitably come to light, the book itself will never be superseded.