With her marvellous new edition of Augustus’ Res Gestae (RGDA), Alison Cooley has produced a textbook that is suitable for Latinless readers and seems destined to replace Brunt and Moore's edition (1967) in classrooms. She has also given us a scholarly edition that rivals Mommsen's (1883) in ambition and scope. And, where earlier editors concerned themselves chiefly with compositional layers and narrative and constitutional history, C. gives unprecedented attention to the Greek translation of the RGDA, to the sites in Galatia where the RGDA was found, and to the RGDA's place in ‘the context of the emergence both of a new visual language and of an official set of expressions’.

C.'s text is based on John Scheid's recent Budé edition (2007). Scheid re-examined the four surviving inscriptions of the RGDA — the two Latin texts from Ancyra and Pisidian Antioch and the two Greek texts from Ancyra and Apollonia — and produced diplomatic texts of each and a composite text with a critical apparatus. C. has chosen not to provide an apparatus and to list divergences from Scheid's text in an Appendix (279–81). Except for orthographical variants and a few well-justified changes in supplemented words (note especially RGDA 2: Cooley [interfecer]unt for Scheid [trucidaver]unt), all of C.'s divergences from Scheid involve bracketing fewer letters, because she includes ‘letters that are no longer extant on the inscriptions but have been read in the past’ (57). But she does not say who these past readers were, and whether we can be certain that they were presenting ‘scientific’ texts that distinguished what was visible on the stones from their own learned conjectures. In her edition, C. presents the Latin and Greek texts on facing pages, and marks an advance on Scheid and previous editors by offering separate translations of each. In so doing, she constructively problematizes the text, by revealing both the differences between the Latin and Greek versions (22–30) and the extent to which the Latin has had to be restored on the basis of the better-surviving Greek.

In her 55-page introduction and 177-page commentary, C. treats all the principal themes of the RGDA — Augustus’ tendentious Triumviral narrative (RGDA 1–2; 104–16), his largesse (RGDA 15–18; 167–82), his embellishment of Rome (RGDA 19–24; 182–212) — in a manner that is judicious, well-informed, and generous. With respect to Augustus’ imperial claims (RGDA 25–33; 213–56), for example, note map 4, ‘Roman empire and beyond’, showing all the regions and peoples named in the text, and figs 22, 23, and 29, ‘Royal successions of Greater Armenia, Media Atropatene, and Parthia’. (But map 5, ‘Egypt, Arabia, and Aethiopia’, should have been widened to show Mariba in Arabia.) C. also treats literary aspects of the RGDA: we learn that the first words of the RGDA, ‘annos undeviginti natus’, contain the five vowels, and the next words, ‘exerci/tum privato consilio et privata impensa’, contain a spondaic hexameter, in the manner of epic and historiography (RGDA 1.1; 106–7). She brings us closer than previous editors to the physical inscriptions of the RGDA, with plans, photographs, reconstructions, and a history of the excavations of the three sites in Galatia (6–22; 43–8). Above all, in her nearly-exhaustive collection of contemporary comparanda, especially the coins and inscribed monuments of Augustus’ reign, she provides endless material for reflection.

With her collection of contemporary comparanda, by showing us how much of the RGDA had already been publicly expressed during Augustus’ reign, C. encourages us to see Augustus and the composition of the RGDA in a new light, and compels us to ask what we mean when we say that Augustus was the author of the RGDA. Following Ramage, C. sweeps aside theories of compositional layers and contends that the RGDA was composed in one burst in the summer of a.d. 14 (42–3). From this it would follow that, when Augustus came to write the RGDA, much of it had already been written. In passages like RGDA 34.2, on the clupeus virtutis, Augustus acknowledges that his account is a compilation of past honours: ‘… and a golden shield was set up in the Curia Julia; through an inscription on this shield the fact is declared (testatum est) that the Roman senate and people gave it to me because of my valour, clemency, justice, and piety’ (RGDA 34.2, where the Greek μαρτυρεῖ shows that ‘testatum est’ has present sense).

Certainly, when the RGDA came to be inscribed on bronze pillars flanking the entrance to Augustus’ Mausoleum, much of it had already been publicly inscribed at Rome and at the Mausoleum itself. C. is right to say, ‘[T]he text of the RGDA should not be thought of in isolation. Rather, it joined other inscriptions already displayed on the exterior of the Mausoleum, which outlined the achievements of his potential heirs’ (6). The other inscriptions included elogia for Agrippa, the elder Drusus, Gaius, and Lucius, and senatorial decrees for Gaius and Lucius, as well as a copy of the clupeus virtutis. The existence of the senatorial decrees is known from the Tabula Siarensis (Roman Statutes no. 37, fr. ii, col. b), and their content can be gleaned from the surviving decrees from the colony of Pisae for Gaius and Lucius (EJ nos 68–9, a.d. 2 and 4). But C. has it backward when she says that the decrees and elogia ‘echo the language of the RGDA’ (163, 165): the RGDA echoed the language of the decrees and elogia.

When we look at the RGDA in this way, as the culmination of a series of commemorations, and commemorations of commemorations, one passage stands out. In commenting on RGDA 34.3 and Augustus’ auctoritas, C. cites the familiar passages from Cicero opposing auctoritas and potestas, and she cites Reinhold (‘a unique ethical-political relationship between himself and all others that was non-transferable’) and Galinsky (‘a higher kind of moral leadership’), but she does not cite any contemporary parallels or passages relating to Augustus. The reason she does not cite any parallels is that there are none — no source, public or private, ever attributes auctoritas in the sense of overarching moral leadership to Augustus or any other emperor, or asserts that Augustus’ ‘position in the state was based upon auctoritas’ (160). As we read C.'s commentary, it becomes clear that we have given RGDA 34.3 and the word auctoritas a significance they never had for Romans.

In a commentary that offers so much, every reader will find quibbles. At RGDA 6.2, it may be that ‘Augustus’ emphasis on his tribunician power’ was ‘a way of representing himself as concerned with protecting the interests of the common man at Rome’ (40), but what Augustus says is that he used his tribunician power to accomplish what the Senate wanted. At RGDA 7.1, with respect to the Triumvirate and the Lex Titia, waiting a trinundinum before voting a proposal into law meant waiting three nundinae or seventeen to twenty-four days, not three days (133). At RGDE 13, where princeps is translated as ἡγεμών, C. points out that ἡγεμών probably reflects princeps in the senatorial decree from Cyrene (161; EJ no. 311, 4 b.c.); it is worth noting that princeps noster appears earlier in Paullus Fabius Maximus’ edict on Augustus’ birthday, where it is rendered as ὁ θεός and ὁ θειότατος Καῖσαρ (EJ no. 98, 9 b.c.). At RGDA 34.1, κυριήα was surely an attempt to translate the Latin arbitrium, not res publica, and something has gone wrong with the Greek (260). The third-person Appendix to the RGDA is unlikely to have been ‘composed in the Greek east for a provincial audience’ (276), since it is in Latin and since it mentions Augustus’ benefactions to friends and senators (App. 4). The most important thing to say about the Appendix is that it does not derive exclusively from the RGDA; one is reminded of the men who enumerated Augustus’ consulships, years of tribunican power, imperatorial acclamations, and other distinctions after his death (Tac., Ann. 1.9).

‘I myself handed down to later generations exemplary practices for them to imitate’ (RGDA 8.5). C. has given us the RGDA we shall use for decades.