In antiquity, the lines of what we call the Roman Republic (referring to both a system of government and a period of Roman history) were thrown into relief most clearly by hindsight or by cultural distance. Tacitus notoriously characterised the comparative ease of Tiberius’ succession that confirmed definitively the return of monarchy to Rome by asking, rhetorically, ‘how many were left who had seen the res publica?’ (Ann. 1.3), while Polybius in Book 6 modelled a recognisable but slightly alien Roman state as, ideally, a dynamic and balanced interplay between the three major Aristotelian types of rule (monarchy, aristocracy and democracy). The seductive clarity of the view from outside or afterwards is apparent in the more traditional modern accounts of the Roman Republic, with their tendency to reproduce a decidedly odd narrative, largely cut and pasted from Roman imperial literature's focus on exemplary great men, bygone libertas or demokratia, somehow a more essentially ‘Roman’ age from the vantage point of an increasingly global Empire. Getting to grips with contemporary and local experience of Roman republican political culture is both much harder and an essential antidote to these decidedly odd characterisations. Hodgson's Res Publica and the Roman Republic and Gargola's The Shape of the Roman Order contribute to the increasing commitment to this project in recent years.

The ‘shape’ of G.’s title encompasses both the wholly literal (geometric patterns, e.g. concentric circles or orthogonal axes) and the capacious metaphorical (ordering principles and practices that structure Roman political activity ‘at home’ or ‘in war’, that quintessentially Roman binary). In common with most recent scholarship, G.’s Roman political sphere is to be understood not so much as a Mommsenian legal and institutional system or ‘constitution’, but rather as a shared culture of norms, ritual, ceremonial and spectacle. His major sources are textual: ancient literary narratives, ‘normative statements’ of magistrates, Senate and assemblies, and responses of priests and jurists (2).

In ch. 1, G. briefly considers the contrasting accounts of the Roman ‘constitution’ by Polybius (Book 6) and Cicero (De Re Publica), before surveying Roman republican patterns of memory and memorialisation within literary accounts, the Roman calendar and, to some extent, the topography of the city. In the second chapter, he discusses the rituals that link Rome's consuls to particular sites within the city and delineate their departure from, and return to, Rome. As consuls and other major officials move outside the city, roads radiating from Rome across Italy compensate somewhat for increasingly fuzzy topographical knowledge and reliance on reports and initiative from, or close to, the action. Ch. 3 examines the privileged place of Italy in comparison with Rome's overseas empire, with its early articulation as a bounded, geographical unit, and management by a patchwork of statuses vis-à-vis Rome, with treaties enacted by annual levies of soldiers. Ch. 4 explores the ways in which augurs create and maintain bounded spaces. In addition to maintaining the pomerium, the sacred boundary that contains the city of Rome itself, they create smaller, temporary bounded spaces in which to observe signs from the heavens, and permanent, ‘inaugurated’ ones for the performance of sacred acts, clustering tightly within and in the immediate vicinity of Rome. Ch. 5 focuses on Roman political actors’ experience and application of a world organised by augury, both within the city of Rome and outside of it. These Roman actors carry with them their preference for counterclockwise over clockwise, for left over right, for setting focal points and centres, and for establishing circular zones working outwards from these focal points and centres. The sixth chapter concerns the application of spatial assumptions carried within laws and other prescriptions that focus disproportionately on the immediate environs of Rome, but occasionally draw broader circles around the city, or even invoke the boundaries of Italy itself.

This is both a comprehensive and a cautious book. The capaciousness of the concept of ‘shape’ sometimes makes it hard to detect principles of selection or to trace the overarching argument. The well-trodden (road-building in Italy; changing semantics of imperium or provincia) gets as much air-time as the esoteric (augurs’ spatial preferences; the mechanics of imaginary lines on the heavens), and squeezes out opportunities to delve down deeper into very complex topics (e.g. the vexed question of how far, when, and in what sense Latin colonies were ever ‘mini-Romes’). There is very little discussion of material evidence, which ought to offer precious (if never straightforward) clues about what Roman actors thought, to be extrapolated from what they did. While G. criticises Mommsen and others for modelling the Roman state as an autonomous system that experienced change through shifts in its ‘internal logic’ (5), his own Romans seem to operate largely in a cultural and intellectual vacuum, even as their empire expands ever outwards. There is little room for exploring the consequences of Roman rule's encounters with peoples with different, and sometimes longer, imperial histories of spatial articulation, or the substantially reactive nature of empire that will include regular responses to local territorial disputes. G. does, however, offer one tantalising glimpse of Roman power's generation of local initiatives: the case of the augural enclosure of the allied, Oscan-speaking town of Bantia, perhaps, like the town's more famous ‘Oscan law’, inspired by the practices and norms of the nearby Latin colony of Venusia (156–9).

H.’s tightly focused book is a study of the contemporary invocation of the term res publica in the late Republic, focusing particularly on the works and age of Cicero, framed by discussion of second-century b.c.e. usage on the one hand, and by that of the early Principate on the other. Tracing invocation of this intensely contested term offers a compelling perspective on the political struggles of the late Republic, and the ultimate demise of these particular battles within the early years of monarchy. In her first chapter, H. grasps the nettle, offering two base-line definitions of res publica as ‘civic property/affairs of a given civitas, and the communal spaces within which those who administer the property and affairs of the civitas move’ (11). These base-line definitions help to sharpen our sensitivity to the twists and turns of wildly opposing claims on the term, and to the politically notable semantic developments that are at the heart of the book. They also alert us to the extent to which common one-size-fits-all translations frequently distort the term. Most of us know that res publica is not in its resting state ‘a republic’, let alone ‘the Republic’, but H. shows eloquently how conversations may focus on a particular state of civic affairs within Rome, and how, within specific contexts, participants in these conversations may lament the compromised condition or even loss of an idealised form of what we might call ‘the Republic’.

H. is particularly acute in this chapter and the one that follows on contested relationships with, and responsibility for, the res publica. Thus, for example, magistrates such as Cicero were able more or less to identify themselves in practice with the res publica long before the provocative characterisations of de facto monarchy (e.g. Ovid's ‘res est publica Caesar’, Tr. 4.4.15, the title of H.’s seventh chapter). At the other extreme, popularis rhetoric asserted that responsibility for running the res publica lay with the populus Romanus.

H.’s third chapter concerns the identification of internal threats to the res publica and their elimination, upholding in the process particular idealised manifestations of the res publica: Scipio Nasica's killing of Tiberius Gracchus, the senatus consultum ultimum against Gaius Gracchus in 121 b.c.e. and Sulla's wholesale restructuring of the res publica as dictator are notable examples. Cicero's consulship of 63 b.c.e. is the pivotal event of the fourth chapter, with a close reading of Cicero's strategies for casting himself as true defender of the res publica in contemporary and near contemporary works, as well as in hindsight. Ch. 5 covers the civil war between Pompey and Caesar, and the competing relationships with the res publica claimed by them or on their behalf. While the rhetoric of Pompey's side mobilises the removal to his camp of a substantial proportion of the res publica, in the form of consuls and the majority of the Senate, Caesar in the opening scene of the BC (1.1) pillories such references to the res publica as constant and sanctimonious. Ironically, hostile contemporary and later accounts turn on Caesar's own narcissistic self-identification with, and monopolisation of, the res publica.

Ch. 6 examines the deeper history behind Augustus’ jarring claim at the beginning of the Res Gestae to have liberated the res publica ‘privato consilio et privata impensa’ (1.1). H. traces decades of claims of private actions and, indeed, private (in the sense of non-office-holding) actors saving the res publica, including, of course, Cicero. Finally, ch. 7 explores the rapidly diminishing air-time taken up with talk of the res publica, as the princeps dominates civic space (or, as contemporary discourse preferred to put it, sponsors the res publica) and public political argument retreats. We see hindsight sharpening lines between then and now, both in Velleius Paterculus’ notorious characterisation of the restoration of the ‘venerable and antique form of the res publica’ (1.89.3) on the return of Augustus to Rome after the defeat of Cleopatra and Antony, and in Tacitus’ stark evocation of dwindling memories of the res publica in generations born after Actium or during the civil wars, a res publica this time provocatively unqualified by adjectives.

H.’s treatments of first-century b.c.e. and first-century c.e. claims on res publica offer a compelling entry-point to contemporary elite conversations, and her commitment to listening around Cicero rather than merely to Cicero is impressive. Perhaps inevitably, tuning into contemporary conversations is harder when the individual's own voice struggles to be heard above a cacophony of later reception contexts, as is the case for Cato the Elder and Julius Caesar. Ultimately, however, H.’s sensitivity to the twists and turns of res publica contributes a significant part of the answer to the crude but important question of how contemporary Romans thought about politics in the late Republic.