This collection is the outcome of a 2017 conference in Nottingham aimed at encouraging historians to take Gramsci more seriously than they have. Gramsci's interest in Antiquity was essentially political, but the essays here are not confined to his passing references to Roman history or the ancient world and draw more widely on key Gramscian notions, notably ‘hegemony’. These are applied to a wide range of situations, from the power relations depicted in early Greek poetry to themes specific to Roman history.

E. Zucchetti's background paper sets the stage with a helpful introduction to the Notebooks in which these ideas were sketched as well as Gramsci's own uneven fate in the intellectual trajectories of post-war life. Paradoxically, in Italy itself, just as scholars of Gramsci were showing renewed interest in the philology of the Notebooks, this from the late seventies, among a younger generation of ancient historians there was declining interest in his work, with the Grundrisse displacing Gramsci as the text in which to look for Marxist ideas about Antiquity. That ‘reaction’ was probably best exemplified by Andrea Carandini.

M. Canevaro shows how the resilience of Athenian democracy, ‘dominated by the lower classes’, lay in a set of practices that fostered the political integration of the city, suffusing the whole of Athenian society with a ‘common sense’ committed to its continued functioning as a democracy. Following Demosthenes, Canevaro argues that it was through the honour system that the demos chiefly maintained its power. M. Di Fazio demonstrates Gramsci's abiding interest in philology in a paper that looks at the (intensely political) debates around the origins of Etruscan and at Gramsci's assessment of the very different methods that were being deployed therein. E. Nicholson discusses Rome's rise to power in the Greek East through the prism offered by Polybius’ life and work. Imperial consolidation was a cultural process as much as the expansion of empire had been a military one, and it crucially involved the assimilation and creation of more Greek intellectuals committed to Roman rule in the way Polybius was.

No fewer than three contributions discuss Gramsci's conception of the empire as a cosmopolitan regime. M. Balbo in a fascinating essay foregrounds a major passage of the Notebooks which spells out Gramsci's argument for a history of the Risorgimento that would trace its fatal division between the intellectuals and the masses back to the seminal moment of Caesar's creation of a class of ‘cosmopolitan intellectuals’ drawn from the empire as a whole. ‘Caesar cuts the historical-political knot with his sword and a new era begins, in which the East gains so much importance that it overpowers the West and causes a rift between the two parts of the Empire’ (187). This aspect of the Augustan Revolution, its ‘denationalisation’ of Rome and Italy, was thus profoundly determinative of the entire course of Italian history. So Gramsci. M. Bellomo underscores Gramsci's refusal of any possible comparison between modern and ancient forms of imperialism and notes that if he was ‘fully aware of the brutal aspects of Roman imperialism’ (169), he also knew that Rome's successful integration of provincial elites was a unique feature of the empire that even Britain would signally fail to replicate. Santangelo in his chapter on ‘Caesarism’ notes that Gramsci took from G. Ferrero the idea of Caesar establishing a ‘cosmopolitan bureaucracy’ by entrusting many of his slaves and freedmen with important public duties. He notes that he took a keen interest in Tenney Frank's Economic History of Rome, which he read in an Italian translation from 1924, so one cannott help wondering how Gramsci would have reacted to Rostovtzeff's history of the Roman empire, had he had access to the revised version of that published in Italian in 1933.

In her chapter on the way Gramsci understood ‘Caesarism’, E. Giusti makes the point that ‘what he is interested in is rather the idea of “Caesar” as it was later developed by Octavian Augustus’ (243). This ‘Caesar’, a prefiguration of Machiavelli's Centaur, a bundle of ‘force and consent, authority and hegemony, violence and civilisation’ (Gramsci), is reflected in the subtle way in which Lucan's Bellum civile captures the malleable character of Augustan ideology. J. Paterson's essay is flawed by its odd notion of hegemony as flowing from some mysterious ‘consensus’ between rulers and ruled, reflecting the same conflation of consent with consensus one finds in C. Smith's chapter. ‘The hegemonial narrative emerges from a dialogue between ruler and ruled’ (258), writes Paterson, as if groups and series ever enter into a ‘dialogue’ in any society anywhere in history. This confusion apart, the substantive part of his argument suggests that no alternative ways of thinking ever emerged to challenge the legitimacy of the empire or undermine its ‘hegemonic’ narrative. The Christians were no exception, of course. The eschatology of the ‘Kingdom of God’ is most sensibly read as an implied statement of the Church's peaceful coexistence with the state authorities, a sort of division of kingdoms. ‘Everyone must submit to the supreme authorities’, says Paul in Romans.

With D. Nappo's chapter one turns to Late Antiquity and the ‘fall of Rome’. He rightly underscores the element of originality in Gramsci's conception of history as a fusion of culture, society and economy. But here the pages on crisis/crises (279–83) yield precious little by way of any understanding of how Gramsci might have conceived the internal conflicts that were supposedly resolved from the outside by the invasions. That is because Gramsci's own scattered reflections on all of this add up to little. Gramsci, like the vast majority of Marxists of his generation (Arthur Rosenberg excepted), was a ‘primitivist’. Nappo half-heartedly defends this stance but is wrong to endorse what he calls ‘Gramsci's lucid interpretation of machines in the ancient world’ (287), the idea that these were never labour-saving but merely facilitated the movement and transport of heavy objects. Andrew Wilson's seminal paper in this journal (JRS 2002, 1–32) showed how much more advanced the Roman use of machinery was in key sectors like mining.

In Zucchetti's concluding ‘Afterthought’ chapter, the claim that ‘any hegemonic construction interests all the actors, including the masses, either as cooperating with the construction, or as negative symbols’ (353) invites the perhaps not so obvious comment that as masses ‘the masses’ do nothing unless they are organised, that is, unless they function as (organised) groups. As inert serialities they are in no position to ‘cooperate’ in anything, much less ‘consent’ to anything. When Gramsci defines hegemony in terms of the ‘spontaneous’ consent given by the ‘great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life’ (Selections from the Prison Notebooks, tr. Hoare and Nowell Smith: 12) by ruling classes, ‘spontaneous’ has the sense of passive (cf. Lucy Grig in her introduction to Popular Culture in the Ancient World (2016), ‘This idea of imposing conformity through cultural means rather than through outright coercion is also key to the work of Antonio Gramsci’). Moreover, every crisis of sovereignty is a crisis played out within and between organised groups. The term ‘social group’ that Zucchetti favours here does not help, because it obscures the distinction between groups as active, organised entities (the sort that brought about the Augustan revolution) and classes as inert ensembles that can only act and become effective through organised groups. Thus ‘group’ and ‘class’ are not substitutes; groups arise within the broad matrix of classes and classes only ever act through groups.

One theme the editors might have pursued was how far Mazzarino's famous essay on the ‘democratization of culture’ reflected his reading of Gramsci. It is hard to believe that Mazzarino would not have read Gramsci carefully. He was a close friend of Bianchi Bandinelli whose admiration for Gramsci was widely known (14). At any rate, Mazzarino's theme of the great ‘re-awakening of nationality’ in the late empire and his description of that as a ‘democratization of culture’ resonate strongly with Gramsci's interest in the way languages reflected histories of class.