The timely and topical question of how best to harness the talents of outlying ethnic groups and thereby allow them to contribute to the state's growth and success naturally has serious implications for many of our own contemporary problems today. M.’s monograph zooms in on one such group, the provincial soldiers (denoting subjects of Roman rule from the provinces who may be either legionary or auxiliary soldiers) who had such a huge impact on the events of a.d. 69 (and beyond). This slice of embedded ‘otherness’ within the military framework drew on manpower from many areas, but particularly Syria (the Flavians) and the Rhineland (the Vitellians), as M. emphasises (p. 71). M.’s central contention is that Tacitus in presenting such provincial soldiers in the Histories intended (in the spirit of didacticism which pervades or even defines Roman historiography) to offer valuable lessons to his contemporary Trajanic audience about how to create a stable empire based on stable provinces: in short, Tacitus sought to have a significant impact on the real world outside his text and on the future shape of the Roman empire. For M., provincial soldiers are a potentially destabilising presence (‘fuel for the civil wars’, p. 72) because (i) they are not invested in the ruling order which they serve and (ii) they harbour dreams of independence, which make them susceptible to those leading separatist movements (e.g. the Batavian revolt). (M.’s first explanation seems to me less contentious than the second.) In increasingly relying on such provincial soldiers, Rome's empire faces serious structural problems: in M.’s view, Tacitus' Histories urges that somehow such men must be given rewards (above all, citizenship) to align their own personal interests with the stability of the empire.

In Chapter 1 M. establishes the principle that military service to the Roman empire by non-Romans historically functioned through the expectation of rewards (M. engages helpfully with Cicero's Pro Balbo along the way, particularly as a prelude to Julius Civilis' concept of prouinciarum sanguine prouincias uinci, Tacitus, Histories 4.17.2). When this system of compensation starts to misfire, then provincial soldiers potentially become a corrosive commodity, driving civil wars and fostering instability: M.’s detailed reading of the Batavian revolt serves to pinpoint and illustrate these problems in action. Tacitus' metaphor of accounting (Histories 4.32.2) attributed to the leader of the Batavian revolt, Julius Civilis, is used to illustrate the provincial soldiers' costly ‘investment’ whose ‘return’ increasingly fails to match its promise. This serves to illuminate more broadly the failures of Rome's practice of relying on provincial manpower, despite the growing risks of imperial instability. As Chapter 2 elaborates, the provincial soldiers are not the only disruptive force in the equation (cf. the Praetorians in Rome and discontented provincial communities more generally), but they are a particularly dangerous one because of their military training. M.’s comparison of Tacitus' ‘map of empire’ (Histories 1.4–11) with Thucydides and Sallust (pp. 81–4) and Augustus' Res Gestae (pp. 89–98) helpfully draws out how Tacitus distinctively transfers his map's organising principle from time to space. Thereby events become ‘products of the expanse of empire, rooted in location, distance, and diversity’ (p. 84). In Chapter 3 M. explores how the annalistic structure of Tacitus' Histories illuminates the consequences of Rome's failure to incorporate the provincial soldiers who were doing most of the fighting. The mismatch between annalistic form and the events of a.d. 69–70 is designed to make a point: this lack of clear distinction between domestic and foreign affairs suggests a blurring of boundaries between Roman and Other in the text, which has real and dangerous consequences for the empire's stability. M. returns to the Batavian revolt in Chapter 4, which examines how participants on both sides in the conflict fail to engage with the impact of a century of Roman rule in the northern provinces. While the provincials aspire to a pre-Roman freedom (now unrealistic), the Romans want to revive a rigid ‘ruler versus ruled’ hierarchy, which will only exacerbate current problems. Here M. sees the Histories' didactic element as really coming into play: Tacitus favours a ‘new deal’ which offers far greater rewards to the provincial soldiers in order to stabilise their loyalty to Rome. (Many of M.’s comments in this chapter took on an eerily contemporary resonance for a reviewer reading the monograph after the United Kingdom's referendum on whether to stay in or leave the European Union.) In Chapter 5 M. pushes this argument further by suggesting that, in Tacitus' view, the empire could gain considerable stability through a much more robust and considered incorporation of provincial soldiers and civilians (through the award of citizenship) and that the aftermath of the Social War is an important model for this process of unification.

There are inevitably points where I had unresolved questions. For example, when M. initially asks whether Civilis has anything to teach readers because he is a dishonest and untrustworthy spokesman for the provincial cause (p. 37), this seems to underestimate Tacitus' propensity elsewhere for using flawed narrators to articulate valid points of view which transcend the speaker's status (e.g. Eprius Marcellus, Histories 4.8). Though M. constructively compares Percennius from the Annals, he could do more to introduce further instances of unreliable narrators, which should oblige us to take Civilis' views seriously (given how central they are to M.’s argument). I also offer some small miscellaneous niggles: (i) it was odd in the discussion of the annalistic tradition to see Peter as the standard reference point for the fragments, rather than T.J. Cornell (ed.), The Fragments of the Roman Historians (3 vols [2013] = FRHist, cited at p. 106 n. 22, but not featuring in the bibliography – there were a few such omissions); (ii) although M. signals that he will avoid the term Romanisation (p. 4 n. 10), it still crops up in the body of the discussion (p. 145); (iii) although M. stresses the importance of distinguishing between Tacitus the ‘historical individual’ and the ‘implied historian’ Tacitus (p. 39 n. 20, p. 205), the multiple fluctuations between ‘Tacitus' and ‘the narrator’ in M.’s usage were sometimes distracting (e.g. p. 158), at least for this reader.

My final point relates to how M. situates his excellent monograph within the sphere of Roman historiography. At times M. demarcates strongly (polemically, even) between (on the one hand) ‘literary’ (pp. 7, 69) or ‘intertextual’ readings (p. 1) (which he robustly criticises, despite himself using the same techniques productively e.g. on pp. 40–1, 80–1) and (on the other hand) ‘historiographical’ ones (to which he himself lays claim [p. 208]). Yet the former techniques are surely subsets of the latter, given that historiography focuses on the writing of history. I suggest that when M. makes such distinctions, ‘historiographical’ and ‘historical’ might have been clearer terms to use. Although M. defines his own scholarship as delivering a new kind of historiography, aspects of his monograph still have a tangible relationship with the trailblazers of historiography (T.P. Wiseman and A.J. Woodman) despite his unease about such associations. Interestingly, M.’s cover image of the Batavian cavalryman Imerix's fragmentary gravestone and even the monograph's title seem to make a statement, pointedly aligning M.’s scholarship with serious history and distancing him from ‘literary’ readings of Tacitus' Histories. Nonetheless the body of the work is packed with perceptive historiographical (as I see it) analysis of Tacitus' Histories (and well beyond). M.’s achievement is to deliver historiographical readings which are rooted (more firmly than some) in historical soil: indeed his even-handed and detailed references in footnotes to the scholarship of both I. Haynes and H. Haynes could be seen to illustrate this point succinctly. It would be a shame if practitioners of historiography were to overlook this valuable and far-reaching monograph through M.’s sustained efforts to avoid being associated too closely with the kind of Roman historiographers guyed by J.E. Lendon in his spirited article ‘Historians without History: against Roman Historiography’ from the 2009 Cambridge Companion to the Roman Historians edited by A. Feldherr (M.’s former advisor for his 2007 dissertation). In short, M. has produced a tremendously enjoyable book, which has much to say to historians of Rome and Roman historiographers alike.