M.'s companion to ancient political autobiographies offers a valuable collection of chapters on how we are to understand memoirs and autobiographical writing in antiquity. With a focus on the political autobiography, this collection sets out to fill a void in the study of ancient literature, where the previous approach to autobiographies and memoirs has been mostly aimed at the authors' philosophical thinking. In his preface M. states that the aim of the volume is to clarify what it meant in antiquity to write about oneself (p. vii). He carves out three themes: how the genre of memoirs and autobiographies originated; how political autobiographies worked as one of the means by which authors could defend and explain political actions and choices; and how the genre changed over time.

The volume opens with a chapter on Classical Greece. Here V. Gray offers an interesting account of self-presentation in the polis, where the focus, so we like to believe, was orientated towards the community and not to the same degree as later on individuality. Gray shows how politicians, philosophers and other writers felt a need to explain and defend their actions, and points out that autobiographical contributions can be traced all the way back to the Archaic Age. She divides autobiographical writing in the Classical Age into various genres: travel literature (which is classified as autobiography if the journey is presented as a personal inquiry), memoirs of famous men (where the author tries to defend his actions), letters like Plato's or historical memoirs, such as when Thucydides and Xenophon include their own experiences in their historical accounts. Gray argues in her conclusion that one of the important aspects of classical autobiographies is the authors' ability to constrain their self-representation by ‘adopting various forms of the “stranger's stratagem”’ and concludes that the successful autobiographer disarmed his readers' natural scepticism of self-praise by casting himself as a victim (p. 34). Gray successfully defines the many purposes of autobiographical writing and introduces the many different categories in which autobiographical writing should be divided.

The chapters by C. Bearzot and M. focus on the Hellenistic age. Bearzot describes how the decline of the polis was followed by increasing interests in individuality and, as well as M., analyses how individuals, in their writing, explained and justified their actions or staged their own importance, and so offered a valuable introduction to how the authors' self-justification found its way into their historic or biographical accounts in the Hellenistic Age. How autobiographical contributions served as a way of justifying one's actions is also the main theme in the following three chapters on Republican Rome by J. Candau, J. Tatum and M. Mayer. In late republican Rome, Roman politicians like Scipio Africanus, Sulla and Caesar wrote accounts of their own role in the events in order to defend themselves and protect themselves and their reputation from attacks by their enemies. J. Geiger and R.T. Ridley focus on autobiography in the age of Augustus. Ridley's chapter, which focuses on Augustus' Res Gestae, is particularly interesting, especially the first part, where he offers a useful introduction to how the Res Gestae rests on a long tradition of grave inscriptions set up to commemorate the achievements of the Roman aristocracy. In the following section Ridley turns to how modern scholars have interpreted the Res Gestae and describes how that interpretation has been both naïve and superficial (p. 277). He then discusses Augustus' attempt to provide his own version of some of the events and some of the accomplishments which marked his principate. One easily accepts Ridley's view that the study of the Res Gestae can be narrow-minded. But his own attempt to prove Augustus wrong by showing where the Res Gestae is incorrect or misleading and the ironic remarks on Augustus' claim to modesty offer no alternative to existing scholarship.

P. Varneda's chapter on autobiographical habits in the first century c.e. is a very useful account, in particular of Flavius Josephus and his attempt to explain his actions in the Roman–Jewish wars and his choice to join the emperor's court. By offering a comparison of Josephus' various texts, Varneda provides a valuable analysis of the author's complexity and the many issues with which a man in his position and with his history had to deal.

R. Westall and F. Brenk treat autobiographies in the second and third centuries. They offer an interesting analysis of the memoirs of Trajan, Hadrian, Severus and the historian Appian from Alexandria. The memoirs of the emperors are, of course, lost and have to be extracted from references in, for example, Dio's Roman history, Pausanias and the Historia Augusta. The chapter provides a useful insight into the thoughts and views of some of the most important emperors in those two centuries. It is, however, never an easy task to know when the Historia Augusta offers reliable information, and Westall and Brenk offer some useful thoughts on the challenges of working with the Hist. Aug. The volume ends with H. Leppin' s chapter on the Late Empire, which provides a solid introduction to the writing of the pagan writer Libanius from Antioch. In the course of the chapter Leppin offers a substantial account of the author's life, thoughts on his own existence, his career and his thoughts on politics and religion, which is useful to the study of an important pagan author and so also to how pagan intellectuals defined and positioned themselves in an increasingly Christianised world.

Seen collectively, the volume is a valuable contribution to autobiographical writing in ancient literature. The eleven chapters offer a broad chronological and thematic introduction to the many aspects of political memoir and autobiography, and show how the genre developed from Classical Greece to Late Antiquity. M. meets the aim set out in the preface, and students of how Greek politicians, Hellenistic kings, Roman magistrates, intellectuals and other public individuals in antiquity presented themselves could very well start here. No study or companion can cover everything but one misses none the less a chapter on the Christian autobiographical tradition. Leppin argues in Chapter 11 (p. 418) that the Christian texts were spiritual rather than political autobiographies and should, as a consequence, be excluded. That might be justifiable, but the question still remains whether politics and religion are so easily separated or whether, in the promotion of the Christian god, there lay a political motive. Nevertheless, even if a discussion of Christians writers and how they promoted themselves and their choices would have offered an exciting ending to a successful volume, it does not change the general impression of a committed, solid and well-arranged study.