This book consists of six chapters, as well as a prologue, epilogue, notes, section of further reading and index. The prologue, ‘The Rhino Dies’, and Chapter 1, ‘Commodus's Great Games’, set the scene of the book's title, Commodus’ slaying of a rhinoceros in the games of 192 c.e., and lays out T.'s wide-ranging approach, which encompasses the political, social and cultural dimensions of the Roman spectacles. Chapter 2, ‘When in Commodiana’, seeks to rehabilitate the emperor as a ‘populist’ by arguing that, through his guises in the arena as hunter and gladiator, he ‘sought to establish a new, direct relationship between himself and his people to the exclusion of traditional interests’ (p. 32). In Chapter 3, ‘An Emperor Loves His People’, T. contextualises Commodus’ extreme behaviour of appearing in the arena himself by putting the games in larger, historical perspective, in particular their use as a vehicle of communication between the emperor and his people. Chapter 4, ‘Feeding the Monster’, surveys the kinds of games that the Romans enjoyed (with a focus on gladiatorial combats and chariot racing); the sourcing of their animals and expenditure on their production; and the training regimes, combat and competition procedures, social status and cultural perception of their performers. Chapter 5, ‘Win the Crowd’, demonstrates that the crowd was not a ‘single, consistent organism’ (p. 77), but instead was driven at any given time by a wide range of motivations (e.g. tax relief, betting, hooliganism) that in turn depended on such factors as the city (e.g. neighbourhood loyalties), the physical context of the spectacles (e.g. venue size) and the crowd's social composition (e.g. circus factions), among others (on the circus crowd, cf. now S. Forichon, ‘Furor circensis: étude des émotions et des expressions corporelles des spectateurs lors d'une course de chars’, Nikephoros 25 [2012], 159–203). T.'s central argument here can be summed up: the Roman games were daily life but on steroids (p. 79: ‘an intensified form of normal life’). Chapter 6, ‘How to be a Roman’, further explores the social psychology of the crowd by considering the ways in which the games reinforced what it meant to be Roman to an increasingly multiculturally diverse audience, integrating them even as they were being entertained. Here he puts forward the attractive theory of ‘graceful aggression’ (p. 95), whereby gladiators and charioteers were seen as embodying cardinal (i.e. martial) Roman virtues and in this way served ‘as role models for the Roman viewer: competitive, tough, but fully under the control of the patron of the games’ (p. 102; for a complementary theory on the acquisition of virtus by athletes, whom T. does not discuss, see now A. Wacke, in Kultur(en) Formen des Alltäglichen in der Antike [2013]). The epilogue, ‘Fighting Back’, considers examples of Romans, ranging from ordinary spectators to gladiators to Christians (e.g. Perpetua), who failed to observe the protocols of the games (from scrawling graffiti in the stands to martyrdom) and thus can be seen as opposing the normative social order. The book closes with a highly useful and up-to-date bibliographical essay, all the recommended sources being in English.

This book successfully covers a remarkable amount of ground within relatively few pages, is written in a lucid, engaging and often humorous style, is well-informed by the essential literature and is packed with innovative ideas. T. has an admirable ability to think big and creatively about longstanding scholarly debates on the appeal of the games while anchoring his theories with a deft touch for humanising detail. For instance, he helps the reader to understand the figure of the gladiator as a deep and permanent fixture of Roman culture, one who surfaced in street conversation, household decoration, even on ‘a clay baby's bottle at Pompeii stamped with a figure of a gladiator, presumably so that the infant could drink in his strength and courage along with its milk’ (p. 57). Elsewhere we hear of the struggles of gladiators as human beings, far beyond the arena: ‘What must it have been like to be a gladiator's partner or child? The fear, the terror at every cheer ringing out from the arena, the financial uncertainties of losing the breadwinner must have been overwhelming’ (p. 115). By framing performers in this way, we understand them less as the ‘heartless murderers and cutthroats’ that they have been constructed to be (especially in the Western mind via cinema) and more as part and parcel of a wider, even banal culture of violence in Roman society at large. Moreover, in pursuing such lines of inquiry and indeed spending the majority of his book investigating the possible motivations and forms of agency of the non-elite (despite the title's focus on the person of the emperor), T. demonstrates a high degree of empathy towards the Romans, especially those cut from humbler cloth (cf. his Popular Culture in Ancient Rome [2009]). His interests and approach illustrate (productively, I believe) how far scholarship itself has shifted its assessment of the Roman games away from the shrill condemnation of earlier generations to a more neutral, incisive comprehension, due in large part to Classicists’ greater engagement with social scientific enquiry (cf. G. Fagan, The Lure of the Arena: Social Psychology and the Crowd at the Games [2011]).

Because the book is written for a general audience (the series is entitled Witness to Ancient History), the pedant – perhaps inevitably – will have quibbles with points that get passed over without sufficient comment. The book only makes limited use of the visual evidence, but it would have been salutary if the book's illustrations and, indeed, artistic representations in general had been more fully explored and integrated into the discussion. For instance, T.'s thoughtful chapter on the agency of the crowd at the games – definitely the best general introduction to the topic – would have been complemented by recent work on the iconography of the crowd as an expression of imperial power and surveillance (e.g. B. Bergmann, in Le cirque romain et son image [2008]). In addition, given that some readers will encounter this material for the first time here, it would have been to their benefit if greater scepticism had been expressed about the veracity of some of the literary sources. For example, T. states matter-of-factly ‘Trajan's games, where eleven thousand animals were slaughtered, emphasized just how vast the scale of the operation was. The games were spread over 123 days, meaning that the equivalent of the entire mammal population of London zoo was destroyed roughly every two days’ (p. 47). While such seemingly precise mathematical formulations are no doubt helpful to a modern readership trying to conceptualise the games’ economies of scale, the numbers belie the reality that we have no external means of confirming them, and thereby of separating imperial bombast from fact. Framing such accounts in more tempered language (e.g. ‘allegedly’ or ‘said to have’) would have been more judicious, a caution that T. admirably wields elsewhere (e.g. p. 48).

But these are minor quibbles for a book that I otherwise enjoyed and profited greatly from reading. Indeed, it is a mark of its success – and T.'s mastery of this genre – that his book is accessible to the widest possible readership while still providing much rich food for thought for advanced students and scholars as well.