I begin this review with a mega biblion that will be hugely welcomed by Roman historians of all stripes: Tim Cornell and his team's long-awaited new edition of the fragments of the Roman historians,Footnote ¹ featuring more than one hundred Roman writers of history, biography, and memoir. Cornell and his team have replaced the long-outdated edition of Hermann W. G. Peter with a state-of-the-art three-volume work. The first volume provides an excellent and comprehensive guide to the authors; the second features the parallel texts themselves, alongside new translations; the final volume comprises the commentary, plus the necessary concordances and indices. The clear layout makes it easy to match up the introductions to each author, their testimonia and fragments, and then the related commentary. The selection and presentation of the Roman authors is careful: the introduction describes the aim to present all that is known about the authors and their work but also emphasize ‘the limits of our knowledge’ (7). This is clearly a more conservative selection than before (and rightly so; the thirty-six Historia Augusta ‘historians’, for instance, are relegated to their own appendix). The coverage is broadly chronological, ending in the third century (which is of course slightly disappointing for those interested in the rich body of late Roman historiography). This is clearly a landmark achievement, and it is especially to be welcomed that it is unusually user-friendly, for students as well as for scholars. Another point might be of interest: out of the 111 Roman authors (or groups of authors) featured there is but one woman: Agrippina the Younger (no. 77), whose memoirs were cited by both Tacitus and Pliny the Elder. Of the ten historians involved in this project, incidentally, just one is a woman. These figures have led me to consider the gender ratio of the books under review this time and the results are striking: out of the sixteen books under review, just three have female authors.

Barbara Levick, my predecessor as Roman History reviewer for this journal and a contributor to the Fragments project, is a highly-esteemed biographer of members of the Roman imperial family (her previous subjects include Tiberius, Claudius, Julia Domna, and Augustus), and her new book, on not one but two empresses, is a model of its kind.Footnote ² Faustina I and II, mother and daughter, the wives of Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius respectively, featured prominently in the public image of the Antonines, appearing with striking frequency in the numismatic and epigraphic record. Levick argues convincingly that the Antonine dynasty was basically a monarchy (in all but name) and that the role of women (particularly ‘successful’ wives and mothers such as the highly fecund Faustinas) was important in presenting the imperial family as ethically superior and, most crucially of all, in smoothing succession. This focus on the public image of the Faustinas is key to Levick's analysis. She is realistic about what we can know of the real women behind this public image, which she nicely presents as an aspect of imperial theatre:

This volume will be both useful and attractive for scholars and students interested in Roman imperial history but also in the role of prominent women more generally.

The consecratio of members of the imperial family was routine by the time of the Antonines, but the complex process by which deification of both men and women became an accepted aspect of Roman culture and religion continues to receive a good deal of scholarly attention. Cicero's plans for the deification of his beloved daughter, Tullia, have generally been seen as the result of his terrible grief at her premature death. In this new study, based on his doctoral thesis,Footnote ³ Spencer Cole argues that we should take the project more seriously, and he goes on to incorporate it into a properly nuanced understanding of religious innovation at the end of the Roman Republic, building upon advances in the study of Roman religion in the last thirty years or so. The book takes us through a detailed study of several of Cicero's treatises, set in their context, moving through the rapidly changing political scene in the 40s bce. The general contours of the rise of deification at Rome are well known but Cole claims to bring a new perspective to the subject with his focus on Cicero, stressing his ‘pioneering role in the cultural transformations of the late Republic’ (198). Cicero's texts here have undoubtedly found a subtle interpreter, but non-Ciceronians may well feel that, as so often, Cicero’ side of the story is allowed to dominate somewhat.

Cicero's side of the story is also taken seriously in Isak Hammar's account of accusations of immorality in Ciceronian oratory (again based on a doctoral thesis).Footnote ⁴ While Cicero's attacks on the morality of his adversaries have long been seen as conventional and generic, indeed as part of the game, as entertainment, Hammar argues that these accusations were not lacking in substance. He states, quite reasonably, that morality had its place in Roman discourse and that therefore it makes sense to try to understand better immorality and its place in Roman culture. His discussions of the ‘logic of immorality’ to be found in Cicero's oratory and his demonstration of its working in Ciceronian argument are, furthermore, not without merit. However, one might feel that previous scholars, working on the generic dimension of immorality, have nonetheless taken it very seriously indeed, and come to conclusions more striking and stimulating than those of Hammar.

Staying in the area of religion, the latest volume from the Collection Latomus brings together a number of (largely) Belgian scholars considering the theme of competition in religion in antiquity.Footnote ⁵ The papers draw on recent scholarship, including new ideas about competition, as well as advances in the sociology of religion, in order to look at the key subject of religious change in antiquity. The geographical and chronological scope is wide, ranging from ancient Babylon to early Islam, though there is a notable concentration on the period of late antiquity. Throughout, certain key themes return: in the pre-Christian period instances of outright competition are vanishingly rare (for instance, oracular sites in Greece were not really in competition with each other). The rise of Christianity, meanwhile, involved a range of approaches to traditional and local religious cultures, from co-option, to rejection and indeed takeover. Different readers will inevitably find different chapters interesting. I was struck by Peter Van Nuffelen's discussion of religious disputation in late antiquity, in which he convincingly argues contra Simon Goldhill that religious dialogue did not simply end with the rise of Christianity (Averil Cameron is arguing on similar grounds in her brand-new book). Danny Praet provides a useful historiographical study of the great religious scholars Ernest Renan and, in particular, Franz Cumont. (Cumont, I learned, was denied a chair in Roman history owing to Catholic suspicion of his comparativist approach to ancient religion.) This is a worthy library purchase but a little more attention to the English would have improved it still further.

Moving to consider some volumes aimed at a rather broader audience, we can start with a readable account of the Roman conquest of Greece.Footnote ⁶ Its title comes from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, at the point where Brutus (who speaks) and Cassius are discussing the civil war with Caesar:

The point Brutus is making is that human affairs – in particular, power – ebb and flow, and one must go with the flow when the opportunity allows. The nature and rationale of Roman imperialism continues to be a much-debated subject: was it opportunistic, or more calculated? Robin Waterfield, who has honed his expertise in the field through years translating Polybius, takes on the debate with a close study of the Roman conquest of the Macedonian Empire, which he sees as the crucial enabling process in the growth of Rome as a superpower. Waterfield is straightforward and robust when it comes to taking sides in the Roman imperialism debate: he falls squarely on the side of William Harris, arguing that Rome practised aggressive imperialism. He is also unapologetic about making parallels between imperialism in the ancient world and today: in this particular case, comparing the ‘indirect’ Roman rule with that practised by the US today, notably in Iraq. One of the particularly interesting issues that this comparison throws up is that of retreat: the Romans invaded Greece and Macedonia, and then returned home again, just as the Americans ‘left’ Iraq. This lively topical resonance adds more bite to what in any case would be a highly useful volume, as there is no other comparable narrative account of this important period in Roman history.

An account of Pliny the Younger and his world based on his letters is a fine idea for a book, especially one aimed squarely at the non-specialist reader.Footnote ⁷ Pliny's letters have received a new wave of attention thanks to current literary interest in epistolography but this is a more straightforwardly historical account as Rex Winsbury seeks to find the real man behind the letters. Syme's view of Pliny as an unconscionable hypocrite is considered but carefully rejected, with Winsbury preferring to see him as an honest man who did his job diligently. The book does a good job of placing Pliny in his immensely status-conscious world. This is not a panegyric of Pliny, of course (though Winsbury defends Pliny's Praise of Trajan as representing a serious attempt to push a senatorial agenda vis-à-vis autocratic rule). As Winsbury allows, even the most generous reader of Pliny tends to be put off by his passion for self-praise, as well as his ‘insistent geniality’ (227). There is very little engagement with the Latin nor with a very large scholarly bibliography, but this is a lively book to set before the interested general reader or intermediate student of Roman history.

Students as well as specialists make up the envisaged audience of the Key Themes in Ancient History series. Such books need not be bland overviews; indeed, in this case the author, Seth Schwartz, notes that his volume is ‘unusually argumentative for a Key Themes book…because the topic demands…an argumentative rather than a magisterial style’ (ix).Footnote ⁸ As Schwartz has himself made clear in a number of important publications, it is not possible in the case of antiquity to take ‘the Jews’ as a group for granted; rather, this text continues the post-1960s scholarly project to ‘de-essentialize’ ancient Jews and, indeed, Judaism. Nonetheless, Schwartz provides a readable narrative of the history of the Jews, from the Hellenistic period through to the end of antiquity. Of particular value perhaps is the substantial use made of the latest advances in archaeological knowledge, alongside the well-trodden literary sources. One the main aims of the book is to demonstrate the centrality of Jewish history to ancient history in general. Jewish history has often been left out of ‘classical’ ancient history, treated as marginal, or as a special case. Schwartz here makes a powerful case for its relevance. One obvious (and yet underrated) area here is that of Jewish literature as an important subcategory of Hellenistic literature. What is most striking, however, is the potential of Jewish history to stimulate by disrupting the standard (and lacking) narratives of ancient history. Schwartz argues convincingly that ‘An account of response to Roman rule, or the impact of imperialism on provincial literary cultures cannot begin and end the story with the Second Sophistic’ (152–3). It is to be hoped that his call will be heeded and, not least, that this stimulating book will be set as a useful textbook for both students of ancient history and their teachers.

A rather different attempt to look at Roman history outside a narrowly compartmentalized view is to be found in Sunny Auyang's ambitious globalizing take on Roman history, which compares the rise and fall of the Roman and Han Chinese empires.Footnote ⁹ These two great empires went through a joint history first of convergence and then somewhat sharp divergence, and the reasons for these differences surely have much to teach the historian of empire. Auyang, unusually enough, is trained neither as a Chinese nor as a Roman historian but is rather a physicist; as such, one cannot help but be impressed by such a feat of polymathy. While comparative studies of world empires are of increasing interest to scholars, this attempt to provide an accessible comparative narrative history for the general reader is something new.

Students and their teachers alike often make use of sourcebooks; there are already so many available that the appearance of a new one will tend to attract some scepticism, as to whether it offers anything substantially new. Christopher Francese and R. Scott Smith's collectionFootnote ¹⁰ begins by offering attractive and readable new translations. The layout is unusual: the texts are arranged alphabetically by author (where applicable), rather than thematically. The introduction explains the rationale for this: the idea is to encourage the reader to encounter the Roman authors as subjective individuals, rather than using extracts as exemplifying particular concepts. Users of this book will decide for themselves whether they consider this to be a helpful approach or not. The selection of material is appealing, offering a lively selection including some lengthier extracts (such as the whole of Juvenal 3), into which the reader can really sink his or her teeth. I was pleased to see the inclusion of some Christian material, often omitted from general volumes, as well as the appearance of philosophy and an interesting range of material in the ‘Documentary’ section, including defixiones and libelli from the Decian persecution. The editors explain that they have deliberately chosen material that would stimulate discussion, and this is likely to be successful. More copious notes would have doubtless helped this discussion, however.

Late antiquity is not very well represented in this current crop of books. However, there is a newly updated and expanded edition of Alexander Demandt's Der Fall Rom,Footnote ¹¹ which first laid out thirty years ago a striking range of the different explanations for the fall of the Roman Empire, most famously combined in a list of 210 causes (increased to 227 in this new edition!) on the final page (719), beginning with Aberglaube (superstition) and ending with Zweifrontkrieg (war on two fronts). This new edition does not represent a full revision: although corrections have been made, the expansions are largely confined to a short section at the end, including a brief response to reviewers of the 1984 edition (including the harsh criticism of Peter Ghosh in JRS 75). The question of the Fall of Rome is clearly just as stimulating thirty years on from the original version and the impact of contemporary political events on interpretation – most notably, of course, the collapse of the Iron Curtain – is perhaps clearer than ever.

The same publisher has produced a brief history of the later Roman Empire in the form of the final part of its six-volume Geschichte der Antike, aimed squarely at a general audience.Footnote ¹² It is unlikely to entice Anglophone readers as it does not offer any particular new insights or approaches to the period. The only other volume in this series to have appeared thus far is Armin Eich's account of the Roman Empire,Footnote ¹³ while those dealing with the Greek world (archaic, classical, and Hellenistic period) and the Roman Republic are yet to appear. Eich takes a traditional approach, strongly focused on military and political history.

Rather more unusual as an approach to writing Roman history for a general audience is Augustus und seine Zeit. Die 101 wichtigsten Fragen,Footnote ¹⁴ in which the author approaches the emperor through a series of questions and answers. This makes for a lively approach that could be especially appealing to students and makes one wonder why popular histories can't more often take an explicitly problematizing approach.

Only one out of the 101 questions about Augustus deal explicitly with finances (no. 49, on Augustus’ tax reforms) and economic history is still not generally tackled in works aimed at a popular audience. However, thanks to the Oxford Roman Economy project, scholarly monographs on Roman economic history are continuing to undergo a boom. Philip Kay's new book focuses on the huge changes in the Roman economy from c.200 to 50 bce.Footnote ¹⁵ In accordance with the generally empiricist line associated with this project, Kay eschews ‘the dead hand weight of Finleyan primtivism’ (6); moreover, he adopts a boldly monetarist approach: as an investment fund manager, he does not share the fear of the intricacies of finance felt by many of his scholarly counterparts. Kay's argument is clearly stated: that a large injection of bullion, in particular silver, into the Roman economy brought about measurable, per capita economic growth in this period. He makes his case clearly for those less well versed in the world of finance, and often with a lightness of touch perhaps unexpected in this field. For instance, at the start of his final chapter proper, ‘Forecasting the Past’, he quotes Douglas Adams’ famous answer to the ultimate question regarding life, the universe, and everything: 42. The problem, Kay admits, is that if we wish to quantify the Roman economy, we need to find the right question. Kay is not afraid of giving concrete numbers (although some of us are less convinced that we can use those found in ancient historiography in this way), even if he does provide the caveat that his estimates are ‘assumptions, not facts’ (325). Approaches to the ancient economy continue to diverge widely and this striking account is bound to stir debate.

I finish, however, with something completely different. What made the Romans laugh? And what can this tell us about them? These are the questions that Mary Beard seeks to answer in her fascinating new book.Footnote ¹⁶ On the way we encounter a diverse range of anecdotes, texts, and characters, some familiar to most classicists (the famous anecdote of Dio Cassius stuffing his mouth with the leaves from his wreath lest he laugh at Emperor Commodus), others less so (the joke book known as the Philogelos, or ‘laughter lover’). As ever, Beard is a shrewd interpreter, deconstructing long-held understandings and interpretations, pointing out complications, ambiguities, and contradictions. Similarly, she is keen to demonstrate throughout the impossibility of really being able to think (or rather laugh) like the Romans. In terms of structure, the first part of the book deals with theories of laughter (there is, of course, no single, overarching theory), laying out the framework, while the second part looks at different aspects of Roman laughter. In these chapters Beard does her best to restore Cicero's reputation as a renowned wit (an aspect somewhat underrated by generations of readers), examines the relationship between autocracy and laughter, investigates the role of mimicry, and explores the Roman joke. In this way, the book considers various approaches and interpretations of Roman laughter as ‘a marker of areas of disruption and anxiety’ (196), as a means of negotiating boundaries (especially those of power and status), and as a distancing mechanism. Some readers might, nonetheless, wish for clearer answers; others (such as this one) might have wished for more of an attempt to investigate non-elite laughter. Overall, Beard wears her learning lightly and this is a rich book and a good read. A solemn book about ancient laughter, after all, would be a very sorry thing.