All six chapters of F.'s volume deal with the Roman domus, in its meaning of a physical house as well as a household ruled by a pater familias, during the Julio-Claudian period. F. uses the construct of the domus as a lens to bring into focus how ancient writers came to terms with a changing world. F. examines the strategies with which the Roman elite conciliated the fact that on the outside the traditional institute of the domus had stayed the same, whereas on the inside the dynamics of power continuously needed to adapt to the new one-man regime.

The main focus lies on the reigns of Augustus and Nero, the beginning and the end of the period under discussion, but en route F. also pays attention to the one-man rule of Caesar, Tiberius and Claudius. The chapters read as a sequence of case studies, examining (1) Julius Caesar's role as a pater familias to his soldiers in Lucan's Bellum Civile, (2) the Domus Augusta as a contested space, (3) the house of Augustus on the Palatine and Nero's Domus Aurea, (4) Seneca's views on the interdependence of rulers and ruled, (5) visualising the act of viewing in Pompeian houses, (6) the effects of bodily functions on the perception of power relations. The book concludes with a chapter on how Tiberius tried to force his way into elite households by way of delatores (‘informers’).

In many ways, this book offers a well-written introduction to many of the key themes that have dominated scholarship on the Roman Empire during the last decades, such as emperorship, ritualised social interactions, the relationship between rulers and ruled, inclusion and exclusion of less-privileged societal groups, the negotiation of power etc. With the domus as the main concept, its chapters offer ideal reading material for graduate courses in social history. However, its diversity also constitutes a potential pitfall. The reader needs to work hard to keep track of the main hypotheses that lie behind the diverging case studies. When F. sidesteps from one author to another or treats historiography and philosophical essays next to tragedies, it is not always self-evident how it all fits together. Nevertheless, The Ruler's House is worth the effort.

The notion of the ruler's visibility is key to F.'s study. Her central argument is that the ruler lacked privacy: he could not avoid public scrutiny and his actions were never without consequence for the political community. The ruler's house was constantly subject to the gaze of others: the viewer always expected some kind of behaviour of his princeps, the ruler needed but to perform – a well-propagated performance of modesty in Augustus’ case, a theatrical performance of extravagance in Nero's case. As that of the head of the household and the one with absolute power, one would expect that a ruler's domus served as the place par excellence for self-display, as a means to inspire confidence and to earn loyalty, a tool to fortify the mechanisms of one-man rule. Yet in practice, F. explains, the house turned out to be the place where the ruler's claim to and hold on power prompted questions. When ancient writers strategically framed their rulers within their respective houses and households, they often voiced anxieties about the fragility of the new regime and the vulnerability of the community as a whole.

Contrary to what one might expect, not only the emperor's domus forms the focus of attention. Everyone who was perceived by others as a ‘ruler’ and of whom it could be expected that he exercised power within the confines of his domus, including an influential freedman or a provincial governor, is part of F.'s examination. The imperial house, however, is central to most of the cases examined in the book. On the other hand, women who were explicitly staged by ancient writers as the sole head of their domus, such as Agrippina the Elder after Germanicus’ death, are left out of the equation or are treated as ‘subordinates’ of the ruler and not as rulers in their own right (regardless of whether they were literary creations or not). This, according to this reviewer's humble opinion, is a missed opportunity as viewing the ‘ruler’ as a gendered construct would have added more complexity to F.'s examination of Roman dynamics of power.

F.'s most original and appealing argument, which is fleshed out in most detail in Chapter 4 and the concluding chapter, is that the ruler's lack of privacy did not victimise him. When watching the ruler, the elite viewer came to realise that the emperor embodied stability and peace. The crisis of the Republican civil wars had ended and the omnipresence of the emperor reminded the elite of their fears (real or imagined) of a return to the chaos of the past. Through their construction of the ruler's house as a contested space, ancient writers raised awareness of the weaknesses in Rome's political make-up and the ease with which co-habitation with others could escalate into violent conflict. Those who gazed at the emperor accepted autocratic rule because the fear they knew and remembered was stronger than the unknown risks of a future without one-man rule. Because of this, being gazed upon was a necessity for every ruler: his lack of privacy ensured that his subordinates reaffirmed him in his position. In an age in which fear of the unknown seems to dictate a lot of the decision-making processes in our contemporary society, the concluding chapter of the book in particular provokes the reader to question our way of life. For this reason alone, I would recommend this book.