I am no doubt showing my prejudice, but I didn't expect a book on Greek acroteria to make for such exciting lockdown reading. Because of their position high up on temple buildings, extant sculpted materials tend to be fragmentary – and hence pushed to the literal and metaphorical corners of modern-day museums. Look to scholarly publications, moreover, and there is a tendency towards classificatory catalogues,Footnote ¹ markedly less in the way of theoretical discussion (whether about architectural and cultic framing, for example, historical aesthetics, or the intersection between ‘ornamental’ and ‘figurative’ representational modes).

This archaeological and scholarly backdrop makes Corinna Reinhardt's study of ‘acroteria and architecture’ all the more remarkable.Footnote ² The author provides an authoritative overview of archaic and classical Greek acroteria, in stone and clay, between the sixth and fourth centuries bc. Particular emphasis is placed on three case studies: the Athenian Treasury at Delphi, the Temple of the Athenians at Delos, and the Temple of Asklepios at Epidauros (287–326). But this is no ordinary attempt at architectural reconstruction, nor any standard classificatory catalogue. Instead, Reinhardt peppers her account with piquant questions about how acroteria structured changing ideas about, and responses to, Greek architectural monuments. Asking ‘what functions patrons attributed to acroteria’, and ‘how viewers responded to these images’ (31), the book begins by looking to ancient literary and epigraphic sources (20–31). Given the overarching ‘silence’ of textual materials, it goes on to explain why we need to look afresh to the archaeology – and to think harder about how both the design and execution of acroteria evolved over place and time.

Appropriately enough, Reinhardt opens not with an ancient building but with a modern comparandum: the sculptures that crown the Schauspielhaus of Berlin's Gendarmenmarkt (constructed between 1818 and 1821). We are used to approaching such details (in this case, an Apollo riding his chariot) as mere ‘classicizing’ elements, she argues; by extension, we tend to approach extant ancient examples as ‘isolated artworks’ (3). The contrast with ancient responses could not be starker: ‘For the ancient perspective, it is important not only that the statues were taken seriously within the frame of the building, but also that the building could not be seen without them’ (3).

This historiographic backdrop lays the ground for a new and original reappraisal. While acroteria have so often been overlooked entirely, or else connected with general programmes of political and programmatic significance,Footnote ³ Reinhardt champions the aesthetic agency of such elements – how acroteria at once led viewers to the front facades of temples while also establishing a hierarchy of viewing angles. The first section of the book comes clean about the difficulties of identifying acroteria (‘Materialgrundlage’, 33–133). But a meticulous study of extant sculptural bases confirms that they were conceptualized, designed, and executed with an eye towards the buildings on which they were placed. Particularly compelling is Reinhardt's discussion of the Athenian Treasury at Delphi (289–307) – the first such Delphic treasury literally to raise a mythological subject to the roofline, with its free-standing sculptures of Amazons (at the corners) and Greek protagonists (at the centre) carefully developing the thematics of the building's metopes.

As we have come to expect of this ‘Image and Context’ series, the standard of image reproduction and book design throughout is second to none. A minor complaint is that certain photographs are printed too small (e.g. 77, Abb. 40 and 41), and a thematic index might have been a useful navigational tool (supplementing the three indexes of museum inventory numbers, buildings, and mythological names). After so much flicking back and forth between the book's body text and its notes (394–515), I have one other gripe, too: can I be alone in wishing that the series finally ditch its endnotes in favour of footnotes?

A more general ‘introduction’ to Greek sculpture (albeit with minimal reference to acroteria: e.g. 34–5, 96, 99, 363–5) can be found in Olga Palagia's long-awaited handbook, also published by De Gruyter.Footnote ⁴ Given the breadth and monumental scale of this volume, it seems fair to include it here – even though the present reviewer must come clean and say that he is among the twenty-three contributors. Despite the hefty price tag, this will be a great resource for specialist research libraries, as well as those targeted towards undergraduate and taught postgraduate readers. The international cast is striking (‘Some authors are introduced to an English-speaking public for the first time’, v), as is the organizational structure, with chapters arranged around the eight themes of ‘Literary and Epigraphic Testimonia’, ‘Function’, ‘Portraiture’, ‘Styles’, ‘Regional Sculptures’, ‘Greek Sculpture under the Romans’, ‘Techniques’, and ‘Afterlife’. Suffice it to say that the volume promises an ‘up-to-date survey of the principal tenets of our field’ (v) – and, above all, ‘not to talk around Greek sculpture but about it’ (1). This ‘emphasis on material culture rather than theoretical approaches’ (2) will disgruntle some while gratifying others, not least given the heralded objective of ‘rekindling interest in a subject which many may find intimidating or simply far removed from contemporary concerns’ (v).

To Egypt now – or rather to the visually mediated relationship between the ‘Egyptian’ and ‘classical’ worlds. The theme has spurred two recent important publications. The first is a catalogue accompanying the landmark exhibition at the Getty in 2018: Beyond the Nile. Egypt and the Classical World.Footnote ⁵ As Timothy Potts's foreword makes clear, the project opens a larger research initiative on ‘The Classical World in Context’, with various projects set to follow (including, in 2021, an exhibition and volume on Persia and the classical world): the laudable aim is to broaden the ‘Getty Museum's mission of representing the history of European art’, with each exhibition hoping to ‘focus on relations with one non-classical culture’ (xi). There is an urgent contemporary politics to such ‘intercultural’ approaches, even if that backdrop goes unstated in the foreword (Potts prefers to speak of a ‘realization that the traditional disciplinary boundaries of the academy are too narrow to do justice to the extent and complexity of cultural interactions that characterized the ancient world’, xi).

The Getty is not the first to mount an exhibition on the material-cultural interactions between ancient Egypt and the northern Mediterranean.Footnote ⁶ Still, the scale of this particular project is unprecedented, not least in the United States: arranged into four chronologically organized sections, the book's sixteen essays explore some 2,500 years of history, stretching from the Bronze Age into the late Roman Empire; in total, some fifty-two scholars have contributed either essays or catalogue entries. Particularly impressive is the quality of the colour illustrations, including all 191 of the show's exhibits (not just statues, reliefs, and pottery, but also papyri, gems, coins, jewellery, and wall paintings). Among the many highlights is a silver drinking cup dated to the first century ad, complete with two ‘Nilotic’ scenes in high relief (278, no. 175): following a Christie's sale in 2013, the object now belongs to a private British collector, but was once paired with a second cup (also sold by Christie's, in 2004).

The Egypt of the Roman visual cultural imagination comes to the fore in a second book, dedicated this time to Egyptian Landscapes in Pompeian Gardens.Footnote ⁷ The author, Caitlín Eilís Barrett, had already contributed to the Getty catalogue, arguing that Roman mosaics and frescoes ‘might have interacted with multiple contexts and multiple viewers’ (250–3, nos. 152–3). Here attention turns to the wider physical and cultural contexts of ‘aegyptiaca romana’. Recent years have seen a marked interest in the Roman appropriation of Egyptian imagery, whether framed around issues of religious practice, or around broader cultural historical questions about Roman ‘Egyptomania’. While taking its lead from such work (especially that of Miguel-John VersluysFootnote ⁸), Barrett emphasizes archaeological context first and foremost – in particular, the importance of how and where objects were displayed for determining their cultural significance.

For Barrett, it is the horticultural context – especially in ‘Flavian Pompeii’ (21–8) – that is noteworthy. Her book attempts to explain why so much ‘Egyptianizing’ painting, mosaic, and plastic imagery was set up within the garden: ‘people appear to have viewed domestic gardens as particularly appropriate settings for many forms of imagery’, we are told – hence the book's ‘focus on representations of Egyptian landscapes in multiple media within a particular type of household space’ (19, emphasis in original). The bulk of the book is structured around specific case studies, with four of the seven chapters dedicated to particular houses: the Casa dell'Efebo, the Casa del Medico, the Casa del Fauno, and the Casa di Acceptus e Euhodia (see 44–50). Barrett explains that each case study is different, not least in terms of imagery, setting, or media. What is said to unite these various Pompeian ‘Nilotic landscapes’, however, is their invitation that viewers ‘engage through practice with an ever-evolving, society-wide discourse on the nature of cosmopolitan, imperial Roman identity’ (181). Ultimately, ‘representations of Egyptian landscapes in Pompeian houses’ are said to ‘testify to the power and agency of domestic material culture’: ‘by demanding engagement with the imagined “Egypts” that they constructed, these garden assemblages called their human inhabitants to reflect on the relationships between reality and representation, foreign and familiar, and individual and empire’ (350–1).

Barrett does a fine job in reconciling detailed iconographic analysis with cultural historical critique and larger-scale methodological reflection. For some, the chief merit of the book will lie in its data-crunching – the quantitative approach to the contextual distribution of ‘Egyptian landscapes’ (e.g. 121, fig. 2.42), for example, supported by various appendix catalogues (on the variables of location, choice of iconographic motifs, sculptural ‘small’ finds, and the imagery of Isis in garden shrines). For other readers, it will be the more transferable conclusions that matter most: consider Barrett's comments on the ‘material turn’ and its ramifications for ‘rethinking things’ (e.g. 28–40), or else her frequent emphasis on the ‘affordances’ of images in particular sorts of setting (that is, ‘the range of emically recognizable functions, values, and meanings that ancient Pompeians could potentially have associated with Nilotic imagery’ [59, emphasis in original]).

Vesuvian art and archaeology are the subject of numerous other titles received in recent months. Space permits me here to mention just three. First comes a book on Pompeii's purpose-built brothel (VII.12.18–20) – the first ever book dedicated to the archaeology of the site.Footnote ⁹ Sarah Levin-Richardson looks not only to the architecture and material finds of the building but also to its mural frescoes and scribbled texts (almost 150 graffiti are known: see 40–63); her overriding conclusion is that the site was ‘meant to offer not just a quick tumble with a streetwalker, but a sexual experience with drinking, socializing, and the fiction of emotional relationships’ (5). Drawing on ‘recent scholarship in Classics and other fields that has sought to recenter the lives of marginalized groups such as slaves, prostitutes, and the working classes’ (7), her book ultimately attempts to uncover ‘unique avenues of resistance’ – with the hope of furthering ‘the continued examination of the commodification of emotions, the numerous ways in which power and exploitation operated on individual and societal levels, and the arenas for resistance, agency, and community that individuals carved out for themselves in the face of dire circumstances’ (10).

A second title is dedicated to neighbouring Herculaneum, this time comprising a ‘general reader’ introduction, albeit with particular emphasis on the House of the Bicentenary.Footnote ¹⁰ With its lavish colour illustrations and thematic structure, the book's objective lies in ‘presenting conservation and cultural heritage to a broad readership’ (168). Particularly compelling is the discussion of how the Herculaneum Conservation Project, with support from the Packard Humanities Institute, has transformed the Archaeological Park of Herculaneum; there is due emphasis, too, on more recent partnerships with the Getty Conservation Institute, above all in restoring and preserving the frescoes of the House of the Bicentenary (see esp. 137–61). As the authors are quick to remind us, ‘even effective site management can be undone in relatively little time if stakeholders are not engaged’ (161). Little wonder, then, that a foreword prefaces the volume with a ‘hope that this book might even play a part in attracting new partners to help fund the final conservation campaign to conserve and present to the public all of the House of the Bicentenary's spectacular wall paintings and mosaics’ (vi).

Inevitably, perhaps, a richly illustrated book like this puts particular store on what could – and, often, still can – be seen in Herculaneum. A third title, by Hannah Platts, takes extensive issue with this ‘ocularcentric’ approach, attempting to reorientate scholarship in ‘multisensory’ ways.Footnote ¹¹ Taking her steer from a ‘sensory’ cultural historical turn, and not least the recent rise of ‘sensory archaeology’,Footnote ¹² Platts aims at reconfiguring Roman (and above all Pompeian) domestic space from a ‘lived and embodied’ perspective (232): ‘By reconnecting the literary accounts with the archaeological remains of life in the home, this books explores the embodied Roman home, reconnecting it with the vivid sounds and smells, the vibrant tastes, textures and sights experienced by those within’ (2). To my eyes, at least, there is more than a whiff here of ancient Rome as ‘sensual’ other: not for nothing is Alma-Tadema's The Vintage Festival emblazoned on the book's cover, evoking (albeit through the medium of paint) all manner of intoxicating sounds, smells, and textures. Still, Platts's general argument is both timely and well taken: on the one hand, that the ‘study into sensory responses to ancient domestic spaces has largely been restricted to examining vision, sightlines inside and outside the house and movement within it’ (14); on the other, that bodily experiences have all too often been written out of our accounts of the Pompeian house.

Platts is surely right in arguing that scholarship – indeed, the whole project of classical and in particular Roman archaeology – has privileged sight over other sorts of sensory experience (see e.g. 4–5, 21–2).

But other aspects of her argument are less convincing. While the book makes some headway in reconstructing the various smells, sounds, tastes, and feels of the Roman house, the argument that these were deliberately manipulated by home-owners ‘as a means for displaying power and status to others’ is largely left hanging (2). It is a thesis that relies heavily on Platts's recourse to literary texts, above all in the second chapter (‘Sensing Status? Multisensory Awareness and Power Display in the Roman Domestic Realm’). But not everyone will agree, for instance, that ‘Pliny's villa letters demonstrate extensive comprehension of, and concern for, the multisensory experiences to be had within his home’ (29).

‘Sensory’ archaeology leads us on to Claudia Moser's 2019 monograph on The Altars of Republican Rome and Latium.Footnote ¹³ The book is focused around five sanctuaries, ‘carefully selected to offer rich and complementary archaeological assemblages and for their overlapping range in chronological period and regional setting’ (3). While altars are the focus of the book, its subtitle reflects a larger contribution to ‘Sacrifice and the Materiality of Religion’. Ultimately, Moser here aims at recasting sacrifice in Republican Rome as a ‘ritual that is distinctly and interrelatedly emplaced, highly sensual, and recurring’ (1) – something ‘inextricably involved with sensory, embodied, and emplaced experiences in the physical world’ (10).

Truth be told, I left the book feeling rather unsure as to exactly how ‘sanctuaries were centres for the production of sensory experience’ (50). Moser expertly guides readers around the archaeology of her individual sites. But when it comes to the ‘intensity and character of sensory engagement in emplaced ritual experience’ (51), she is arguably better at stating than demonstrating her argument. When the book does attempt to reconstruct ‘sensory experiences’, as in the fourth chapter's discussion of the Sanctuary of the Thirteen Altars at Lavinium, for example, there is a tendency towards vague generalization (‘the sight of blood gushing from the animal's neck, the noise of the animal squealing, the touch of the audience crowding around the altar, the smell of the offal and the excrement of the slaughtered victim, and the taste of the cooked meat’, 119–20).

Time, now, for some news in brief – and for five books that I can cover only in passing. First – and I am aware that Etruria is too often squeezed out of these round-ups – comes a ‘concise general introduction in English’ (xv) to a single Etruscan settlement: Cetamura del Chianti, a site roughly 20 km north-east of modern-day Siena.Footnote ¹⁴ The book is the latest addition within a University of Texas Press series on the Cities and Settlements of the Etruscans; its chronologically structured account champions the ‘vivid contrast with the grand Etruscan cities and other small communities as well’ (110). Second, let me mention a new analysis of the Roman toga – demonstrating, above all, how the toga came to negotiate the identity politics of gender, age, status, and political ideology, both in Rome and in the Roman provinces (‘the toga is like a prism that allows us to turn the light stream of Roman identity into a whole spectrum of different sub-identities’, 2).Footnote ¹⁵ Third, and again with a strong cultural historical bent, is Janett Schröder's study of war monuments in archaic and classical Greece, based on her Bern doctoral thesis of 2017, and championing the central role of such monuments within Greek public life (a ‘decisive contribution to the emergence, legitimation and persistence of polis-communities’, 273).Footnote ¹⁶ Fourth, a new Oxford Handbook to the Archaeology of Roman Germany looks set to become the go-to resource for those researching, teaching, and studying the provinces of the Roman North, with its twenty-four thematic chapters arranged around four sections (‘Prelude, Conquest, and Provincialization’; ‘Core Provinces at the Edge of Empire’; ‘The Transformation of Power’; and ‘External Perspectives and Final Thoughts’): particularly valuable, given ‘British students’ lack on second-language skills (in German, French, or anything else)’ (xiv; see also xix–xx), is the way in which chapters ‘give voice to modern German scholarship on the subject’ (xv).Footnote ¹⁷ Last but not least comes a timely volume on the need to rethink ‘teaching, practice, and research’ in archaeology – a highly personal ‘call to arms’ (24), above all to ‘resist the impacts of the marketization of higher education’ (86) so as to address ‘diversity in disciplinary demographics’ (1).Footnote ¹⁸ The book is passionate in arguing ‘that there exists an enmeshed, mutually constitutive relationship between people, things, teaching, research, and practice in archaeology’ (178–9): there can be no denying the urgency of such stakes – not least when it comes to diversifying the discipline – within the specialist field of classical art and archaeology.

Water – above all, the fluid role of water in shaping the real and imagined landscapes of the ancient Mediterranean – is a theme that unites three other very different volumes. The first is an edited volume on ‘the power of urban water’, derived from a Kiel conference in 2018 (itself connected to a larger Kieler Exzellenzcluster on ‘ROOTS – Social, Environmental and Cultural Connectivity in Past Societies’; there seems some confusion as to whether ‘Connectivities’ should be singular or plural – contrast the references on iv and v).Footnote ¹⁹ What is said to unite these sixteen contributions is a shared commitment to demonstrating how ‘water…constitutes a central factor of urbanity’, no less than the need for ‘multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches’ (1): ‘Archaeology, geology, botany, zoology, but also ancient and medieval history, philology, art history or even religious science are essential disciplines for investigating the fluid relationships between society and the environment, between urbanization and water in pre-modern times’ (9). The book sets out to find ‘connecting’ ways to approach urban water across variables of place and time – in the Mediterranean and in central Europe, and between the sixth century bc and the eighteenth century ad. A short introductory chapter by Haug and Müller (1–12) approaches the subject according to a series of conceptual categories: ‘water as an aesthetic category (perception), water in the context of rituals (agency), urban water as a mental factor, water infrastructure (architecture), water as an environmental factor, and, on a more general level, water as a factor of urbanization’ (4). As is so often the way with edited conference volumes, however, subsequent contributions dissolve into isolated case studies, whether dedicated to the role of fountains in Greek sanctuaries (Philipp Kobusch), the use of water in early Christian rituals (Christiane Zimmermann), or the aesthetic and symbolic functions of water in the ‘narrative worlds’ of medieval poetry (Margit Dahm-Kruse). In all this, the promise of ‘connectivity’ (or ‘connectivities’) only underscores the lack of cross-reference between individual chapters. In sum, there is much here of interest here. But I suspect the book will be raided for its parts rather than read for any cumulative contribution.

Ulrich Müller's contribution on medieval ‘harbourscapes’ in northern Europe – above all, their functioning as ‘imagined worlds’ (242) – takes us to a second title: this time, a sole-author monograph on ‘visualizing harbours in the classical world’.Footnote ²⁰ Federico Ugolini here examines how harbours were visually represented in Hellenistic and Roman antiquity, focusing on images of Alexandria, Portus, and Leptis Magna. Where scholars have so often looked to media like coins, wall paintings, sculptural reliefs, and mosaics as reflections of geographical cityscapes, Ugolini champions what he labels more ‘symbolic’ interpretations, associated in particular with Imperial ideologies of authority, control, and power over the sea (‘aspects of communication, identity, meaning, message, metaphor, perception, signification and symbolism’, 4). At times the direction of the argument within and between the seven chapters gets a little lost, a problem exacerbated by the book's strained expression. Take a sentence like the one that follows:

Still, the championing of harbour scenes as a particular category of late Hellenistic and Roman art is well taken. So, too, is the general point about there being more to these scenes than might first appear – ‘that the symbolism of the examined artworks contrasts with the reality behind the media’ (13).

Roman Seas is the title of a hugely important third volume, promising nothing less than ‘a maritime archaeology of eastern Mediterranean economies’.Footnote ²¹ This is a book, to quote Leidwanger's preface, ‘about using the maritime archaeological record – especially cargos but also ports – to study long-term economic structures in the Roman and Late Antique Mediterranean’: ‘how did seaborne contacts influence the development of economic – and by extension social – communities at different scales around the shores of the Mediterranean?’ (vii). In tackling this question, the author provides a masterful synthesis of ‘Roman and late antique shipwrecks from southwest Turkey and the northeast Mediterranean’– a ‘dataset’ of sixty-seven examples detailed in the first appendix (226–37; see also 13–24). Above all, though, Leidwanger uses this data to reconstruct the complex dynamics of multi-scalar ‘distribution networks’ – ‘the need to approach maritime interaction as a spatially and temporally grounded network phenomenon’ (24).Footnote ²² From an economic historical viewpoint, his ‘bottom-up archaeological view’ points to some important elements of change and transition within Imperial and later antiquity (as argued in the sixth chapter, on ‘Maritime Networks in the Roman East’): ‘loose but geographically expansive networking under Rome gave way to more spatially restricted but coherent interregional structure in Late Antiquity’ (24).

It seems wrong to undertake a review like without including at least one book on Attic vase-painting: in this case, a new, panoramic overview of ‘day-to-day’ life among ‘ordinary Athenians’, as gleaned from the evidence of late archaic and classical painted pottery.Footnote ²³ John H. Oakley has here set out to provide the ‘first-ever comprehensive, synthetic overview of Athenian daily-life scenes’ – ‘a study that brings together material from a wide range of disparate sources and investigates the scenes on primarily Attic black-figure, red-figure, and white-ground vases (ca. 630–320 bc)’ (3). Structured around ten thematic chapters, with the ‘subjects covered by each chapter…arranged mainly by where they took place’ (5), the book leads readers, quite literally, from cradle to grave: the first deals with (among other subjects) childcare ‘At Home’, while the last surveys scenes of funerals and commemoration at ‘The End of Life’ (the subject of Oakley's own earlier landmark study of 2004).Footnote ²⁴ Each chapter concludes with a selective bibliographic overview, catering first and foremost to the undergraduate student market (‘Since the volume is a guide, only the most important references are included, and since the book is written in English, there is some preference for sources in that language’, 6).

An overall strength of Oakley's book is his collection, description, and illustration of materials – not to mention the no-nonsense writing style. A weakness, in my view, lies in the fuzzy parameters of the subject: the question of exactly how to determine ‘scenes of daily life’ in the first place. Discussion of this contentious issue (and the large bibliography associated with it) is essentially limited to the four-page Introduction, concluding ‘that both types of images, those that are constructs and those that more closely reflect reality, give us an insight into everyday life in Athens, and for this reason both are included in this handbook’ (5). Inevitably, perhaps, a book like this is ultimately better at surveying the material than at posing critical analytical questions: consider, for example, the throwaway comment about painted sex scenes, ‘best perceived of as obscene…but they should not be classified as pornographic’ (40).

‘Everyday life’ – albeit much closer to home here in Blighty – takes us to my final title in this round-up: a new thematic guide to the ‘objects and people of Hadrian's Wall’, from the early second century ad through to the end of the fifth century.Footnote ²⁵ The book stems from a fruitful collaboration, bringing together the academic expertise of Rob Collins (its principal author) with the curatorial eye of various specialists in the museums and centres along Hadrian's Wall. What really sets the volume apart, though, is the quality of its illustrations: selected ‘from a fraction of the many thousands of objects that could be illustrated’ (13), printed on thick, glossy paper, and reproduced mainly in colour.

The authors take seriously the charge of immersing readers into a world by turns familiar and strange (17). After inviting us to ‘forget everything you know – or that you think you know – about Hadrian's Wall’ (16), the book mounts a ‘modest attempt to consider life along Hadrian's Wall as a cross-cultural experience’ (17), thereby providing ‘important insights into the past’ (146). Among the many objects that manifest the point is a mould-blown blue glass cup (probably from South Shields), forged into the shape of ‘an African's head’ – which in turn ‘reflects the racial diversity of the Roman Empire’ (22, fig. 1.7).

While most subsequent chapters are structured according to tried and tested themes (‘Dress and Appearance’, ‘Eating and Drinking’, ‘Business and Pleasure’, ‘Belief, in Life and Death’, etc.), others are wholly more innovative. Particularly welcome is the eighth chapter, dedicated to ‘Unknowns’ – twelve objects that have baffled archaeologists, including those made of copper alloy in so-called ‘dodecahedron’ shape (‘Suggested uses have included that it was part of a game, was a mount for a standard or sceptre, or perhaps even related to surveying due to the holes on each face’, 135). Within a popularizing book like this, it is gratifying to see inscribed objects included (their texts printed here in both Latin and English): not just sandstone altars (e.g. 110, fig. 7.1), measures (e.g. 62, fig. 4.6), signet rings (e.g. 34, fig. 2.15), and tombstones (e.g. 127, fig. 7.37), but also the Vindolanda writing tablets that have so enriched our understanding of Romano-British life. Among the various texts discussed here, my personal favourite has to be the supposed ‘intelligence report’ on British natives, with its disparaging diminutive reference to Brittunculi, or horrible ‘little Britons’ (78–9, fig. 5.6). In current political circumstances, the name somehow seems appropriate: Nigel Farage, if you're reading, what better rebrand for the Brexit Party?