Some questions never go out of fashion. My main focus in this issue is the spread of Roman power across the Mediterranean, with multiple new publications appearing on this oldest of subjects. First up is Dexter Hoyos’ Rome Victorious.Footnote ¹ This work of popular history aims to cover what Hoyos dubs in his subtitle The Irresistible Rise of the Roman Empire, though that is rather an odd choice, since Hoyos stresses that Rome's imperial efforts did not always succeed. Hoyos walks us through the unification of Italy and the acquisition of the Republican provinces in the first two chapters, taking the narrative up to the death of Caesar in 44 bc. The next two chapters consider the consequences of those conquests: what a province actually meant, how it was controlled, and the effects both on the new territories’ inhabitants and on Rome's social and political make-up. In Chapter 5, Hoyos turns to the extensive imperial efforts of Augustus and those around him; those of his successors over the next two centuries are dealt with in Chapter 6. Chapter 7 surveys the shifting make-up of the Romans as a result of their conquests, focusing on the spread of citizenship and the changing origins of senators, generals, and artists. Chapter 8 looks at legitimate and illegitimate rule in Rome's provinces, Chapter 9 considers both Rome's self-reflexivity on imperial questions and the view from those regions themselves, and Chapter 10 bolsters the latter by treating concrete resistance to Rome. Chapter 11 looks at the degree to which the provinces became Roman.

Hoyos’ work is highly readable, and he has a knack for moving at pace through successive centuries while still capturing via well-chosen anecdotes the flavour of particular moments. The decision to include not just the mechanics of expansion but its consequences means that this is as much a work of social as of military history. Hoyos is not wedded to any one ideological theory of conquest, and advocates different motives at different stages. And the book is marked by a deliberate and welcome focus not just on the process of conquering but also on the experience of being conquered. His subject, as he defines it, is ‘what happened, how it happened and what effects it had on its subjects, victims and neighbours’ (5). What problems there are, are the result of the medium. Since this investigation covers such a large time span, there is little space for detailed source criticism (consideration of the sources is saved for an appendix). Similarly, Hoyos pays little attention, even in the fairly minimal endnotes, to the scholarly debates on which the book's story is built. Both are understandable decisions. But they might lead us to ask whether this was an entirely necessary book. Put another way: did this largely familiar story need to be told again in this largely familiar way?

Readers wanting to plunge deeper into the maelstrom of scholarly debate beneath the apparently placid surface of Hoyos’ story will be well served by Paul Burton's contribution to the ‘Brill Research Perspectives’ series.Footnote ² These slim volumes are designed as usable literature reviews, distilling the proliferation of academic research into readable summaries that sketch the trajectory of past work and point to possible future directions. Burton has tackled Roman imperialism, and in a mere 114 pages provides an excellent guide to the vast modern scholarship. In its most substantial section, Chapter 3, ‘Roman Imperialism’ (18–72), he walks through in remarkably clear fashion the developing stand-off between theories of defensive and aggressive imperialism (both of which have roots in antique writings). He is particularly interested in the most recent theories (i.e. those propounded since Harris’ 1979 work) – a sensible focus, since the earlier landscape has been described many times before – and dedicates the final substantive section, Chapter 4, ‘The Diversification of the Field’ (73–93), to the manifold avenues into which recent work has splintered, including studies of soft power, the Roman frontiers, and race, ethnicity, and Romanization.Footnote ³ Burton's particular skill is to not just characterize scholarly opinions, but situate them in their political and social contexts. We therefore see how theories of Roman imperialism emerged out of the changing political climate of the twentieth century. This is enhanced by the inclusion of Chapter 2, ‘Imperialism’ (10–18), which sketches modern theories of imperialism more widely, so that the reader can see how the classical cul-de-sac fits into the wider academic network. This research aid thus manages not only to draw a map of scholarly research, but also to go some way to explaining why the map looks as it does. Burton has turned a literature review into an interpretative essay.

Burton's achievement looks all the more impressive when one compares it with another volume in the series, on the imperial cult.Footnote ⁴ This too has admirable aspects: the author, Gwynaeth McIntyre, has an extensive understanding of the nuance, range, and local diversity of the phenomena caught under our umbrella term ‘imperial cult’. She also avoids oversimplification, and one comes away with a picture of an ever-changing negotiation between centre and periphery and the various stakeholder groups of both. She also includes an excellent section on ‘Christianity and the Imperial Cult’ (70–72), pointing to the increasing engagement with the imperial cult among New Testament scholars. But, in general, McIntyre focuses less on the scholarly landscape than on trying to provide an introduction to the topic itself. This results in an essay that is neither one thing nor the other. The treatment of scholarship is not systematic enough to get a sense either of why works are distinctive or of how scholarly thought has progressed. And without the space to treat it in proper detail, her discussion of the cult itself is necessarily confined to a limited array of topics (and material evidence is largely laid to one side). The use of case studies, while effective for illustrating particular points, leaves one with a very incomplete understanding. But perhaps that only confirms how tough is this series’ brief.

Back to our main focus. By far the most new important work in Roman imperialism is Nicola Terrenato's The Early Roman Expansion of Italy (indeed, Burton's penultimate footnote, pointing out possible directions for future research [104, n. 486], highlights one of a number of earlier studies by Terrenato that serve as prolegomena to this monograph).Footnote ⁵ Twenty years in the making, Terrenato's work attempts an overview of the conquest of central and southern Italy, drawing together a huge amount of literary, archaeological, epigraphic, and artistic material (including much published only recently in Italian, and as yet insufficiently absorbed into Anglophone scholarship), and combining it with the insights of anthropology. It also steers clear of the ‘sequential, event-based format that is so commonly used to narrate the early part of the Roman expansion, with its countless wars, colonial foundations, and magistrates’ (xiv–xv). Most importantly, it attempts a ‘comprehensive historical revision’ (3). Put simply, Terrenato has an utterly different vision of how Roman conquest works. As he demonstrates in Chapter 1, ‘Views of Roman Imperialism Through Time’ (covering much of the same historiographical ground as Burton), all scholarship on Roman expansion, whether advocating for a defensive, aggressive, or economic imperialism, is united by its assumption of Roman agency. Non-Romans, if addressed at all, are included only for their experience of being conquered, be that suffering or resistance (see Hoyos above). For Terrenato, that is to follow the steering of later Roman writings, a steering picked up and exacerbated by their transmission history (in, for example, Christian and Carolingian tracts, Machiavelli, Hume, and Montesquieu). The wider social context, both within Italy and outside it, is ignored. Terrenato, on the other hand, sees the expansion as the result of a ‘grand bargain negotiated between some specific actors across ethnic and state lines’ (250). These elites and their cross-peninsula networks were the driving force behind the earliest stages of the Roman empire.

This is the kind of utterly radical thesis that takes some proving. Terrenato's case is built on two contentions; as he says himself, ‘In the worldview espoused by the present book, historical change is produced by the complex interaction of the mentioned local agencies with global socioeconomic trends’ (xvi). He begins with the latter, laying out in Chapter 2, ‘The Long-Term Context of Roman Expansion’, the sociopolitical structures – by which he means extended and interconnected lineages of landed elites bound by corporate loyalty – characteristic of the first millennium Mediterranean. Chapter 3, ‘The Global Context of Roman Expansion’, demonstrates how these same structures drove territorial growth elsewhere in the Mediterranean between the fifth and third centuries bce. For Terrenato, Rome's experience was paralleled in Syracuse, Carthage, Marseille, and Tarquinia. So it is only in Chapter 4, ‘A Heterogenous Conflict I’, that we turn to Rome's expansion into Italy. Here Terrenato seeks, via a consideration of Rome's interactions with Veii, Caere, Capua, the Samnites, and Arezza, to demonstrate the diversity of military and civilian interactions that made up what we think of in homogenous terms as ‘conquest’. Chapter 5, ‘A Heterogenous Conquest II’, develops the argument, suggesting that those interactions were driven by relations between Roman and non-Roman familial and factional elites. Individuals and networks, rather than ‘states’, were the agents of conquest. These were powered by personal and political networking rather than abstract state or ethnic loyalties. Chapter 6, ‘The Consequences of the Expansion’, challenges the traditional view of the conquest of Italy as representing a dramatic sea change to the status quo, proposing instead a much more minimalist picture of impact. Chapter 7, ‘Conclusions’, collates all this to present a new synthesis of how Italians in central and southern Italy – both Romans and non-Romans – built an ‘empire’ together via well-established elite networks.

This book is, to my mind, an extraordinary achievement. It is hard to enough to conceive of a thesis so contrary to entrenched wisdom; more difficult still to try to prove it. That does not mean that Terrenato is correct. Classicists will no doubt be uneasy about the ease with which our narrative sources, some of which were not written much later than the events in question (as Terrenato acknowledges), are set aside. And a cumulative case is only as strong as the struts on which it is built; this study will no doubt prompt an avalanche of responses challenging each of these. But Terrenato has offered the greatest shake-up to this field in decades, and the detail and ambition of his case will demand a detailed riposte. This is an inspirational example of the blindingly original work that can still be done in antique studies when an open mind and an eye for detail are combined. And finally, this book has consequences for the very identity of Classics in the postcolonial era, as Terrenato hints on his final page (272). Where others have tried to rehabilitate the experience of the subjects of empire, Terrenato has handed them the very agency of conquest.

A new edited collection, Rome, Empire of Plunder, asks the same basic question as the works above: ‘How did the Romans become an imperial power?’ (1).Footnote ⁶ Like Terrenato, the editors, Matthew P. Loar, Carolyn MacDonald, and Dan-el Padilla Peralta, seek to pay real attention to the contribution to conquest made by those conquered. But they come at the question from a different angle: the cultural appropriation that empire-building entailed. Ancient writers floated the idea that the Romans acquired and controlled their empire by ‘competitive emulation…by taking things over, appropriately’ (2). The authors here provide an exciting set of exploratory studies into how that understanding of the imperial project was processed in Roman artistic, literary, and material outputs. The editors explain in the Introduction that they have built their concept of appropriation on the theoretical work of Robert Nelson, highlighting that appropriation is the result of ‘deliberate and purposeful actions’, that it involves a semiotic shift with a ‘transformative, and in some ways violent, quality’, and that it produces ‘a distortion rather than a negation of what has been appropriated’, resulting, over time, in ‘a semiotic bricolage that always carries with it vestiges of its earlier lives’ (3).Footnote ⁷ This is then explicitly postcolonial, refusing either to anaesthetize Roman conquest or to present it as inevitable. The editors see Roman identity as being created out of the constant movement of persons, things, and practices between Rome and its provinces – ‘Rome became a culture of cargo’ (7, emphasis in original) – with both centre and periphery given equal agency in the process (8).

The volume is split in three sections: ‘Interaction’, ‘Distortion’, and ‘Circulation’. The first one includes four essays that investigate how Roman writings in Latin treat the appropriation of material spolia. Basil Dufallo and Ayelet Haimson Lushkov's contributions show how Plautus’ and Livy's writings are not just texts-about-cargo but themselves texts-as-cargo. They both are about and are cultural appropriation, demonstrating how texts did not just engage with imperial concerns but were themselves part of them, a point reiterated in Thomas Bigg's essay on Octavian's naval commemoration and Stefano Rebeggiani's on the Pergamene Galatae. Indeed, Matthew Loar, in his response, wonders ‘whether the [material] appropriative impulse is synchronous with the emergence of Latin literature’ (89). The second section has three chapters looking at how the symbolic capital of objects and motifs remains the same, is erased, or is transformed as those objects and motifs are appropriated. Marden Fitzpatrick Nichols’ chapter on Vitruvius’ treatment of appropriated Greek architectural forms, Jennifer Trimble's on the Ara Pacis’ references to Egyptian jubilee temples, and Grant Parker's on Roman reuse of Egyptian obelisks all, as Carolyn MacDonald points out, show how appropriation does not simply create new symbolic meaning, but merges the past and present meanings so that they become almost indistinguishable – so-called ‘double distortion’ (163). The third section contains four pieces that address the layering of new symbolic capital during appropriation across space. Amy Richlin's essay on Roman comedy, Carrie Fulton's on the mechanisms of commerce, Micah Myers’ on the Gallus papyrus, and Megan Daniels’ on numismatic images of Hercules-Melqart look at the relationships between persons, commodities, and communication across the wider Mediterranean connectivity, and draw particular attention to the role of intermediaries in appropriation.

As the editors acknowledge in their Introduction, scholars of Latin literature have long been interested in both intertextuality and the inheritance of earlier Greek traditions; likewise, scholars of Roman art and archaeology have always of necessity treated Roman ‘copying’ of Greek ‘originals’. But the editors’ contention is that these have rarely been looked at together, and that their volume thus ‘bridges the disciplinary divides in pursuit of an interdisciplinary perspective on Roman appropriation’ (5). Many edited collections make such claims in their Introduction; what is impressive here is that all three sections end with a response from one of the editors, trying to draw together the essays’ insights to tease out more cohesive conclusions.

The second concentration of books reviewed in this issue is on the topography of Rome. Two new publications look at the Palatine and Capitoline Hills respectively. The first is T. P. Wiseman's new monograph, The House of Augustus.Footnote ⁸ Wiseman's contention is that the site on the Palatine usually identified as Augustus’ palace is nothing of the sort. He traces brilliantly how, as so often, past scholarly hypotheses slowly crystallized into assumptions that eventually petrified into facts (23–9). He uses recent archaeology to show that this site is actually an earlier larger house (perhaps of Hortensius?) that was transformed under Augustus into a smaller private residence and a public precinct dedicated to Apollo. Wiseman then constructs as best he can what that complex looked like, and what Augustus intended by it. This new view of the Augustan Palatine is fed into Wiseman's picture of the competing political ideological factions of the Late Republic. For him, the demolition of the scholarly construct of Augustus’ palace, and its replacement with a humble abode, removes a key pillar of the traditional picture of the autocrat Augustus. He argues instead for a representative of the people, their defender against the exclusive oligarchy that had brought the res publica low. Confiscation of optimate properties was part and parcel of the traditional populares policy of confiscation and reallocation of land. The house of Augustus thus serves as the smoking gun in Wiseman's case for Augustus the Populist.

This is an important book. Wiseman demonstrates effectively the inaccuracies and dangers of oft-repeated assumptions that survive only because of scholarly inertia. He has a gift for finding novel approaches to much-discussed problems. This book will undoubtedly prompt more circumspect discussion of Augustus’ residence. And modern scholarship, often rather smug about its capacity to see behind the political smokescreens of the past, will only be enriched by this alternative perspective on Augustus. It certainly creates intriguing possibilities. Particularly interesting are its implications for Augustus’ successors. One of the difficulties with Tiberius’ reign, for example, becomes that he had inherited a role forged in a populist mould, which sat uneasily alongside his own natural inclinations towards optimate models of government (13).

There are a number of issues, however. First, it is not entirely clear what this book wants to be: the book that its title suggests, a history of the Palatine as a whole, or a new interpretation of Augustus. The first would be important, but an article rather than a book, and arguably not one written by Wiseman, since it is based heavily on archaeological work (predominantly that of Amanda Claridge, who, I hasten to add, is heavily cited in the footnotes, and generously thanked and credited). Wiseman's most important contribution is to harness that work in support of his interpretation of Augustus – no brutal warlord or cynical autocrat – but exactly what he claimed to be, the champion of the people against the anti-democratic oligarchs. But that argument is obscured by the extensive material on the longue durée history of the Palatine. Much of the material in Chapter 3, ‘The Palace’ (30–47), and Chapter 4, ‘Palatine Prehistory’ (48–64), has little relevance to the central argument. So we read at the end of Chapter 3: ‘I hope this eclectic canter through the centuries has given some idea of how the Palatine came to look the way it does today. What matters for our argument is the point at which this chapter began’ (46–7). Similarly, Chapter 5, ‘Palatine Legends’ (65–81), while successfully demonstrating the rich associations of the Palatine which Augustus was simultaneously tapping into and appropriating, does not particularly strengthen the book's main contention.

Second, Wiseman is highly polemical about his methodology and that of his academic opponents. His approach is to always privilege those who wrote at the time: ‘proper understanding requires contemporary evidence’ (7). The book's conceit – the ‘historical detective story’ subtitle – means that witnesses are repeatedly ‘called’ to testify, often against Wiseman's critics. This though requires a dual standard. Authors with whose testimony Wiseman agrees are taken seriously (and as readers we are castigated if we dare to think differently). But those telling a different story are portrayed as disingenuous; Cicero's words are ‘just lip service’ (18). Is it then any real surprise that Wiseman's portrait of Augustus looks exactly like that given by Augustus himself? Can ancient historians, heir to a drastically fragmented archive, really afford to give such absolute credit to what survives?

Third, this book successfully marries the deconstruction of erroneous archaeology to a new portrait of Augustus. However, the construction of the book requires the two to be logically connected:

But the two premises do not demand each other, and while most will now accept this picture of Augustus’ house, fewer will follow the wider portrait.

Fourth, it is hard not to see the influence of our current political discourse – in which both sides of the political spectrum claim to represent the will of the people – in Wiseman's vision of Caesar and Augustus as popular champions. This is based on a two-party view of optimates and populares that is the subject of heated academic discussion (of which Wiseman has been a vocal member), but that debate does not get much of a look in here. But my objection is more fundamental. There is nothing wrong with the contemporary world allowing us to see antiquity differently. However, Wiseman's pejorative language makes this a story of heroes and villains. His picture of Caesar and Augustus verges on apology – presumably few Gauls would agree with Wiseman's description of Caesar's rule as ‘conspicuously humane’ (4) – and their opponents are repeatedly castigated for arrogance and avarice. We even read that ‘To call him “Octavian”, as modern historians do, is to miss the point entirely, or (worse) to side with the assassins and their friends’ (103). History, like life, is rarely black and white. The polarization of contemporary political discourse into terminally opposed binaries has changed public life for the worse. It must be resisted, especially in the academy.

As Wiseman attempts to transform our understanding of the Palatine, so Jason Moralee does for the Capitoline, the smallest but most sacred of Rome's seven hills.Footnote ⁹ But the twist is his focus on late antiquity, when Rome was in decline and the Capitoline with it. Moralee thus sets his eyes on Rome's holy mountain just at the point when the gaze of most scholars is drifting elsewhere. His second innovation is that, rather than providing a total history of the hill, he splits his study into two halves: the first looks at ‘Lived-In Realities’, the second ‘Dreamed-Of Realities’. Moralee is interested in the Capitoline as both a historical, physical space and a literary, imagined location. Put another way, he considers both how it was experienced at the time and how it was (re)used and (re)imagined by posterity. He aims ‘to capture the ways in which the Capitol affected the imaginative life of the Romans and post-Romans, animated scholarship and writing, and shaped the continually evolving topography of the city of Rome from the third to the seventh century ce’ (209).

After an Introduction (1–26) providing a potted history of scholarly work on the Capitoline from antiquity to the present, we turn to Part I. Chapter 1, ‘Climbing the Capitol Hill’ (29–56), looks at when and how emperors did and did not process up the Capitoline between the third and sixth centuries. The Capitoline was originally central to the script for imperial accessions, arrivals, triumphs, and the investiture of magistrates. In late antiquity it was gradually replaced. However, it was replaced not just with Christian sites such as St Peter's or the Lateran Palace, but with other traditional locations, including the Forum Romanum and Trajan's Forum, suggesting that the causes of the change were more complex than Christianization alone. Even if the world of imperial politics moved to new stomping grounds, Chapter 2, ‘Living and Working on the Capitol’ (57–85), shows that much of the Capitoline's urban environment was not just maintained but invested in and renovated well into the sixth century. It was part of multiple neighbourhoods and networks, and remained key for social, commercial, administrative, industrial, and residential activities. Chapter 3, ‘Christianity, the Capitoline Hill, and the End of Antiquity’ (87–109), demonstrates that, from the sixth century to the eighth, the Capitoline remained an essential part of the inhabited section of the city, despite assorted natural disasters, and that it took on an increasing role in the Christian culture of Rome. And, as is apparent from a legend of Augustus’ vision of Jesus and subsequent dedication of an altar there, the Capitoline's new roles and associations remained bound to its pre-Christian past.

Part II opens with Chapter 4, ‘Experiencing and Remembering the Capitoline Hill’ (113–37). Here Moralee looks at the use of the Capitoline as a setting for Christian and non-Christian stories from the second half of the fourth century that focus on the abandonment or destruction of the Capitoline. For him, this demonstrates its enduring importance as the symbolic heart of the Roman empire, as late antique authors used literature to process that empire's new problems (‘barbarians’, ‘usurpers’, and ‘heretics’). Chapter 5, ‘Learning from the Capitol's Deliverance’ (139–64), explores how Christian apologists from the second century on, even those who had never been to Rome, directed their ire at the Capitoline as the centre of pagan cult and thus of the persecution of Christians. Moralee focuses on how these Christian authors engaged with the Capitol's famous deliverance from Gallic ruin in 390 bce. Chapter 6, ‘Learning from the Capitol's Destruction’ (165–84), then looks at the three destructions of the Capitoline in 83 bce, 69 ce, and 80 ce. While non-Christian authors had tried to process, understand, explain, and justify those tragedies in diverse ways, Christian authors reimagined them as part of a homogenous tradition of non-Christian temples (including those of Jerusalem and Delphi) destroyed by the Christian God. Chapter 7, ‘The Capitol and the Legends of the Saints’ (185–208), investigates the explosion in production of Roman martyr narratives in the fifth century, many of which set their romantic tales on the Capitol, turning it into an imaginary site of resistance. A lengthy Epilogue (209–30) looks forward to the multivalent afterlife of the Capitoline in the medieval period.

Moralee has written an unusual book. The combination of a wide chronological and narrow geographical focus allows its readers to see change on both the micro and the macro scale. Its methodological insistence that the literary memories of a place are as significant as its historical life is both important and welcome. And it serves to demonstrate how much important work is left to be done on those Christian authors – the apologists in particular – of whom unsophisticated readings abound. On the other hand, the attempt to provide a dual ‘thick’ description for both life and memory, though successfully exposing the richness of the Capitoline in the Roman and post-Roman worlds, does makes this a tough read, tending more towards discursive exploration than clear overarching argument. This is a difficult book then, but a rewarding one.

Finally, Willemijn Van Dijk's whimsical guide to Rome, Via Roma, merits brief mention.Footnote ¹⁰ The conceit here is a potted history of Rome – or, at least, of a series of key moments from Rome's foundation to the modern day – told through the modern landmarks past which tourists unwittingly tread. Some of the links between sites and stories are obvious: the Via Monte Tarpeo provides a predictable spot to recall Rome's foundation stories (12–16); the Piazza del Teatro Pompeo for the changing nature of politics in the Late Republic (44–9). But others are more surprising: the Via Castrense reveals the Severan Amphitheatrum Castrense, subsumed and so preserved in the Aurelian Wall (98–101); the Via del Corso is a window to a popular prostitute race sponsored by the Borgia Pope Alexander VI (119–22), and the Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta and its strip of non-Italian territory akin to the Vatican reveals the itinerant past of the Knights of Malta, the heirs to the Templars, whose design and construction allegedly contain secret codes of which Dan Brown would be proud (112–14).

‘I know of no greater pleasure than to wander the streets of Rome. As I take you by the hand, I invite you to join me in discovering this pleasure’ (5). I was charmed by Van Dijk's walking tour. This book is not academic – there are no footnotes, almost no discussion of scholarship, and a meagre one and a half pages of bibliography. It is part popular history, part personal memoir, part guidebook. There are some oversimplifications and outdated views in the periods on which I am qualified to judge, no doubt echoed in those I am not. But a work of this scale demands simplification, and no one could cover such a vast span of history and not fall short of the standards of experts of particular periods. And, in fact, Van Dijk is throughout alert to the most important scholarly questions. More importantly, object biography is currently all the rage and, although she makes no such claim, this little book can proudly take its place amid that trend, as it builds a layered picture, page by page, of not just the history but the character of this seductive city. Indeed, it is telling that the book begins with the Tiber, where pottery fragments found at the western slope of the Palatine provide the ‘first archaeological indicator of solidarity’ (9), and ends with the Piazza Augusto Imperatore, where Richard Meier's new housing for the Ara Pacis reveals the aesthetic divides among modern Romans. Understanding Rome, or any city, means understanding not just its space but its people. The fifty vignettes here combine the two magically.