This study of local magistrates and their offices in Roman Gaul is a welcome contribution to a growing body of scholarly literature concerned with the functioning of provincial societies at the level of the civic community. English-speaking readers may be surprised by Lamoine's stated intention to focus on the ‘banal’, but the French word evokes the ordinary rather than the hackneyed or trivial: here, the day-to-day business of administering justice, managing the local treasury, and maintaining public order. These activities, and the lives of the people who performed them, appear in the pages of ancient authors only when interrupted by war and disorder, leaving them little understood or explored. But L. here convincingly demonstrates the potential of epigraphic evidence to shed new light on this important aspect of ancient society.

The work is the revised version of L.'s doctoral thesis, and rests on a systematic study of over 200 inscriptions recording the names and careers of Gallo-Roman administrators. It is rigorous, but also lively and accessible. L. assumes no prior knowledge of Roman Gaul, or of the evidence and approaches used in his study. But the orientation which he provides for his readers neither weighs down nor fragments his arguments. The result is a book which will be valued by experts and non-experts alike.

Part I lays out L.'s methods and approaches, including a critique of the available sources and an overview of related scholarship. Part II moves on to the offices themselves, seeking to reconstruct the functions of the various local magistracies attested in Roman Gaul, and to examine the social status and activities of the people who held them. Here, L. explores issues such as local and extra-municipal career paths, the relationship between magistrates and their home communities, and variations in local and regional administrative practice. Finally, Part III considers the practical extent of the power which came with magisterial appointments, and the means of coercion and enforcement which were available to them: particularly in the face of public disorder.

Throughout the study, L.'s particular focus is on what the administrative institutions of Roman Gaul can reveal about the relationship between the indigenous Gallic élite and the Roman state. His dataset is well-suited to the enquiry. L. is able to demonstrate the legacy of both Roman and Gallic institutions in the character of chief magistracies and financial magistracies in the Gallo-Roman era. He also explores the relationship between the Gallic aristocracy and the principacy via an interesting case-study of an ambassadorial mission to present a gold torc to Augustus.

But the models of cultural change which L. deploys could have been further refined. L. is well aware of the composite nature of personal identity, but his discussion of the issue of ‘Romanisation’ (26–8) strongly suggests that he sees ‘Roman’ culture as a fixed entity towards which measurable cultural progress might gradually be made. This is to miss out on the thought of scholars such as Woolf and Webster, who have argued for a more dynamic and less binary understanding of ancient cultural interactions.

The difficulties are exemplified in L.'s discussion of a family of fourth-century professors from Bordeaux, to whom Ausonius attributes Druidic ancestry (63). L. is surely right to comment that this family was deploying the past in the service of a contemporary agenda. But he also suggests that the memory of the Druids had been preserved by the Gallic nobility, implying the persistent nurturing of a sense of cultural difference and overlooking the possibility that the Burdigalian professors had simply read about the Druids in the works of Caesar, Cicero, Pliny or Tacitus.

Along similar lines, but more fundamental to L.'s subject, is his quest to rediscover the ‘substrat Gaulois’ at the root of the administrative institutions attested in Roman-period Gaul. He concludes that this substrat passed through phases of greater and lesser prominence over the course of the high imperial period, but never entirely disappeared (376). Yet we might ask who, if anyone, continued to identify it as specifically ‘Gallic’; and, if so, how important this was to their own sense of cultural identity. A more explicit engagement with this question would have enhanced what is otherwise an extremely thorough study and a very useful publication.