L.'s first book explores a series of comings to and goings from Rome from Sulla to Augustus, including both unusual instances of ritualised arrival and the heavily textualised arrivals and departures of Sulla's memoir, Cicero's writings and Augustus' Res Gestae. L. is particularly interested in arrivals that assert new beginnings, progressively blurring the line between divine epiphany and human salvation. The result is a compelling account of a late Roman Republic in which other worldly things were startlingly present, a refreshing antidote to overly secular modern treatments of Roman Republican politics. L.'s Rome is a society every bit as believably odd as our own present and recent past, between the Rapture, the Mayan Apocalypse and, closest of all with its alluring, back to basics caliphate and political realisation of apocalyptic vision, the Islamic State.
L. proceeds chronologically, focusing on six major case studies. In Chapter 1, he reconstructs the narrative arc of Sulla's autobiography, beginning with his departure from Rome and ending with his return, inaugurating a new saeculum hot on the heels of the one that went down in end-of-the-world horror. Chapter 2 centres on rituals of reform and renewal in Pompey's consulship (with Crassus) of 70, and particularly his studiedly humble presentation of himself before the censors conducting the Recognitio equitum, leading his horse rather than riding it, having dismissed his lictors, in a sort of anti-triumph or ovatio, a studiedly anti-Sullan gesture. The theological framework within which Cicero memorialised his consulship, exile and return is the focus of Chapter 3. The fourth chapter argues for classifying Julius Caesar's ovatio of January 44 b.c.e. as a highly traditional act of reconciliation, asserting the compatibility of his pre-eminent position with a restored Republic, a departure from the more usual emphasis on Caesar's escalating flirtation with monarchy. Octavian's return in 36 b.c.e. after his victory over Sextus Pompeius at Naulochus, marked by rituals of arrival that engage deeply with the ceremonial of visits of Hellenistic kings, is the centrepiece of Chapter 5. Finally, Chapters 6 and 7 and the bulk of the conclusion examine in detail the textualisation of arrivals and new beginnings in Augustus' Res Gestae, ending with the apotheosis that the work arguably anticipates. The final discussion (pp. 266–75) is of the driverless quadriga now exhibited in the Hall of the Biga in the Vatican, identified by V.M. Strocka in 2009 (‘Die Quadriga auf dem Augustusforum in Rom’, MDAI(R) 115, 21–5) as the chariot inscribed by senatorial decree with Augustus' title of pater patriae and set up in the Forum Augustum (Res Gestae 35). This eerie image of the empty chariot, which also appears on the jacket of L.'s book, draws Augustus away from the human hall of fame in the Forum, towards the realm of the gods.
There is a slight fuzziness around what counts as an ‘arrival’ in L.'s selection, and it can be a little challenging for the reader to string together ‘arrivals’ when we are constantly moving between the more literal sense of the word and the more metaphorical, or considering departures alongside arrivals. I suspect that this is one reason why the introduction seems to struggle a bit to find its focus. But that looseness surely reflects the difficulty of knowing where exactly to look when one is seeking to identify emerging traditions, somewhere between the parousia of a Hellenistic king and the adventus of Roman emperors, and lacking the basic formula and expectations that went with either. As L.'s discussion makes clear, the traditional Roman ritual occasions that inaugurate new beginnings include the census alongside the triumph or ovatio. One of the many strengths of L.'s approach is the dynamic eclecticism of Republican religious and ritual horizons that emerges, crisscrossing ‘alien’ and more local traditions of wisdom, from broadly messianic and apocalyptic visions and gods at the boundaries of several cultures and sets of expectations, to Etruscan saecula, and the omens produced by hoary gods of the Italian countryside.
What is special about ‘arrivals’ between Sulla and Augustus, and what unites them? L. cites H. Flower's Roman Republics (2010) in support of the notion that this period might be ‘identified as a distinct Republic’ (p. 1), but Flower divides this period into a number of smaller units. Her periodisation project is also ‘consciously constructed from the perspective of hindsight’ (p. 33), which seems very different from L.'s engagement with contemporary Roman constructions of and belief in beginnings and ends of eras. To some extent, ending the book with Augustus and putting so much emphasis on arrival theologies in the Res Gestae maintains the first century b.c.e. as a traditional ‘waiting for dynastic monarchy’ zone. This scheme is complicated somewhat by glimpses backwards (e.g. Marius' intriguing association with the Syrian prophetess Martha on p. 39), forwards (to the developed tradition of imperial adventus on p. 278) and sideways (a little too tantalizingly from Sulla to Mithradates on p. 34 and p. 51, as well as from Augustus to the arrival rituals of Hellenistic kings on pp. 194–5), and by interesting and valuable discussions of influence within the period (e.g. of Sulla and Marius on Cicero's self-representation, and of Cicero in turn on Caesar and Augustus). But if one wanted to periodise more robustly apocalyptic and new beginnings ideologies in the Roman world, one might do well to look more directly at what was going on internationally, particularly in the Seleucid and other kingdoms of the Near East.
One of the most impressive aspects of this book is L.'s dexterous handling of his source material. This material, which must often be harvested from the snippets of self-aggrandisement, hagiography or invective that were strung into later narratives of various provenance and outlook, has been in traditional accounts all too easily dismissed as fantastical invention (as if that explained anything). But L.'s treatment evokes a vibrant world in which flying fish, livers inscribed with laurel wreaths and dreams of being taken by the hand by Marius demand our close attention as the evidence on the basis of which deadly serious claims were made about stability in the closely interrelated spheres of gods and men in the ancient Mediterranean. At times, perhaps, the temptation is to be a little too earnest or to press every detail into a single, coherent narrative. The contested nature of signs and salvation both at the time and afterwards makes coherence a little too much to ask for. I am less worried than L. is by the question of whether or not Cicero's recollection of his dream of Marius on the road to Brundisium was entirely reliable (pp. 96–8). I do not find all the examples of tablets, texts and books suggested as forerunners of the Res Gestae (pp. 175–96) equally convincing, and I got a little lost in the intricacy of the scheme of arrivals in the Res Gestae (Chapters 7–8). But these are minor quibbles about a highly stimulating and thought-provoking book.
