Olivier Hekster's Emperors and Ancestors is an important contribution to the study of the images of Roman emperors and the ideology of imperial rule. H. examines the representation of emperors and their family members, dead and deified, present and prospective, from Augustus to Constantine. He analyses a variety of media, from coinage, papyri and inscriptions to cameos, statues and reliefs, incorporating both images authorized by the imperial state and those created by local audiences. The book's sub-title reveals a vital component of H.’s argument: imperial ideology could never solely be whatever the emperor wanted. The imperial image was mediated through a variety of changing, and sometimes conflicting, cultural expectations about kingship held by the inhabitants of the Roman world.

The book opens with an introduction which examines the concepts of family and dynasty in the Roman world and lays out the methodological approach to the sources. The main argument is divided into two parts, ‘Family Ties’ and ‘Claiming Kingship’. The first, ‘Family Ties’, examines genuine ancestral relationships, based either on blood or adoption. Ch. 1 focuses on fathers, ch. 2 on mothers and grandmothers, and ch. 3 on ancestry and the imperial household. Each chapter consists of a series of case studies, which are generally organized chronologically, allowing the reader to follow changes over time. H. shows how over the course of the Principate the representation of imperial fathers diminished, as emperors preferred to commemorate their sons and the future of their dynasties instead. The reverse is true of imperial mothers, whose prominence actually increased over time, reflecting their importance as dynastic agents (109).

Part Two, ‘Claiming Kingship’, focuses on fictitious ancestry. Ch. 5 examines the creation of family connections with mortal predecessors, such as Septimius Severus' infamous adoption into the Antonine house, and Constantine's fictitious descent from Claudius II Gothicus. Ch. 6 turns to gods and heroes as imperial ancestors or divine companions. H.’s case studies show how the Roman res publica adapted to its new monarchical incarnation under Augustus and his successors, as the dynastic element took hold despite the Republican origins of the state. This was shaped, as H. demonstrates convincingly, by the expectations of the people of the Empire, especially the inhabitants of the eastern provinces who were already used to monarchical rule under the Hellenistic kings. Imperial ancestry, even when invented, had to cohere with popular thinking. For example, Constantine's descent from Claudius II Gothicus was not an outlandish invention, but a ‘believable fiction’, similar to the dynastic inventions propagated by late Roman aristocrats themselves (233).

The strength of the dynastic aspect of the Roman imperial monarchy is revealed by the failure of Diocletian's attempt to break free of it, which is the subject of ch. 7. He tried to create a new style of rule, based on the selection of military colleagues as emperors, and played down the importance of imperial women. Diocletian's system could not escape the constraints of the Roman imperial system, and the ambitions of the members of the imperial college, who wanted to establish their own dynasties.

The most important conclusion of the book is that the interaction between ‘central’ imperial media and ‘local’ images of emperors in the provinces is much more complicated than previously thought. H. convincingly shows that we should not always envisage ‘local’ media as immediate responses to contemporaneous messages from the imperial régime. Provincials drew upon their own traditions and ideas in representing emperors and their family members. Civic coinage minted in the eastern provinces proves crucial to this argument. For example, H. reveals how Agrippina the Younger remained prominent on provincial coinage even after she disappeared from denominations minted at Rome, and Domitian's wife Domitia Longina, despite having a minimal presence on ‘central’ coinage, featured significantly in the provinces (132–7). This suggests that there was a provincial expectation that imperial women should be celebrated and commemorated, and that the public image of the régime itself played little part in their thinking. Often short-term innovations made no impact at all. For example, Trajan, despite being the adopted son of Nerva, also promoted his deified father Trajan the Elder; these efforts, however, made no substantial impression in the provinces (66–78). This calls to mind the argument made by Carlos Noreña in his Imperial Ideals in the Roman West (2011) that ideals consistently promoted on coinage resonated most effectively through the Roman world, rather than immediate imperial policies. Romans obviously expected that an emperor would always need an empress, but he did not need two fathers.

H.’s conclusions pose important challenges to our ideas about the immediacy of an emperor's public image, especially the expectation that all imperial images in the provinces were ‘received’ by provincials, as opposed to being generated from independent ideas and traditions (see especially 319–20). The book invites further work on other aspects of imperial ideology, such as military imagery, to see if the same patterns can be found. It deserves serious consideration by all scholars of the Roman Empire.