N.'s book builds on his pioneering 2001 JRS article to demonstrate the untapped potential for quantitative analysis of political discourse in the Roman Empire. He has amassed three substantial corpora for study: a sample of 148,000 denarii from hoards, a smaller but still impressive sample of 36,000 bronze coins from a variety of sources and lastly a database of 575 Latin inscriptions which apply ‘honorific terminology’ to the Roman emperor. All three corpora span the period from Vespasian to Severus Alexander. N. uses these data to study continuities and trends in the representation of the emperor by the Roman state, to trace the dissemination of ideas and values from the imperial court to provincial communities and – more adventurously – to explain changes in the behaviour of municipal elites. This is an ambitious and wide-ranging book which abounds in stimulating and often provocative hypotheses. Only the most important can be addressed here.

The introductory Chapter 1 offers an incisive analysis of the Roman Empire as a configuration of power, stressing both the importance of the emperor as a unifying symbol in a diverse and fragmented empire and the exceptionally close convergence of the interests of the central imperial state and local aristocrats in the first and second centuries c.e. This prepares the ground for the turn to municipal politics at the end of the book.

Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the coinage, highlighting the representation of the emperor as a moral exemplar and benefactor. Personifications of the personal virtues of the emperor appear on the reverse of 13% of denarii in N.'s period; personifications of the benefits of empire account for another 36%. On the basis of relative frequency, N. identifies five ‘core’ virtues (aequitas, pietas, uirtus, liberalitas and prouidentia) and six ‘core’ benefits (pax, concordia, fortuna, salus, uictoria and felicitas). He explicates the meaning of these concepts and discusses their collective contribution to a coherent and distinctly Roman model of a ruler.

Chapters 4 and 5 turn to the epigraphic evidence in order to trace the dissemination of imperial ideals from the centre to ‘officials’ in the provinces and to local communities. They also complicate the synchronic picture presented in the earlier chapters. N. provides compelling evidence both for fluctuation in the relative importance of individual virtues under particular regimes and for the rapid integration of these new emphases into inscriptions erected by both agents of the imperial state and local aristocrats. There are, inter alia, intriguing discussions of the proliferation of references to prouidentia under Hadrian, nobilitas under Commodus (the first emperor born to the purple) and indulgentia under Caracalla (which N. links to his citizenship grant).

N. offers a ‘model of communications’ to explain these patterns: ideas originate in the imperial court and are transmitted downwards and outwards through the organs of the imperial state. Local aristocrats encounter these new ideas through mediating figures such as provincial governors and municipal ambassadors and incorporate them into their own inscriptions. They do so because it is in their own interest to represent the emperor as an exemplary benefactor with whom they can align themselves and thus legitimate their own privileged position. The insistence that ideas move in one direction only (e.g. pp. 315–16) is overdone. We know, for example, that the Hellenistic dialogue of city decrees and imperial letters certainly continued in the Roman East and may well have extended to the West as well (see W. Eck in C. Eilers, Diplomats and Diplomacy in the Roman World [2009]). I also find the insistence on the strategic motivation of local aristocrats unnecessarily reductive – though the focus on this class and their interests does provide a useful counterweight to C. Ando's very different study of the communicative actions of the Roman government, which pays less attention to social distinctions within the provincial population (Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire [2000]).

N. finds in the inscriptions evidence for longer-term trends in the representation of the emperor. First, he deduces from the relative rarity of honorific language in ‘official’ inscriptions in the first century and the almost total absence of virtues on the silver coinage before Nerva (an observation which comes as a surprise after Chapter 2) that the second century was the real heyday of the emperor as moral exemplar. But the argument that virtues were not ‘central’ to the public image of earlier emperors needs to be read in the light of the literary evidence N. has earlier compiled for the first century (p. 50) and of the bronze coinage, on which virtues are already prominent under the Flavians (see p. 237).

N. locates the really important change – amounting to ‘ideological rupture’ – between the Antonine and Severan periods (pp. 223–8, 240, 264 and 283–97). He points to the spread of militaristic epithets such as fortissimus and inuictus, the rise of the honorific epithet dominus and the simultaneous decline in the use of optimus, which had been a ubiquitous feature of honorific language in the earlier second century and which N. sees as embodying the notion of moral exemplarity. This amounts to a shift from a honorific terminology based on the language of ‘ethical value and civic benefaction’ to one based on ‘militarism and autocracy’ (p. 283) – the displacement of the image of a ‘civilian princeps’ by that of a ‘military autocrat’ (p. 264). The contrast is perhaps overstated given that N. has already highlighted the importance of militaristic values in the earlier principate (cf. Chapter 2 on uirtus as a military virtue and Chapter 3 on uictoria, ‘the central imperial ideal around which all others circled’) and that his Appendix 13 reveals the prominence in Severan inscriptions of indulgentia – a virtue and one clearly associated with benefaction. But N. is convincing on the significance of the use of dominus as an honorific epithet for the emperor and right to point out that the explosion begins under Commodus and not Septimius Severus (as usually stated) – though I would add that the rise of the term is even more gradual than he suggests.Footnote ¹

The final section of Chapter 5 raises the stakes dramatically. N. moves from his model of communications to a ‘model of public behaviour’, finding in the changing language of the inscriptions an explanation for the decline in euergetism in the cities of the empire in the third century c.e. Local aristocrats, he argues, engaged in euergetism during the high empire in order to legitimate their social pre-eminence by aligning themselves with the emperor qua exemplary benefactor. They abandoned this euergetism once the imperial state began representing the emperor as a militaristic autocrat rather than an exemplary benefactor. ‘How much resonance could civic benefaction have retained’, N. asks, ‘when the emperor was no longer imagined primarily as a model civic benefactor?’ I am not convinced that it is useful to reduce the phenomenon of euergetism to the result of strategic calculation (or that its symbolic value depended entirely on the parallel with the emperor). But N.'s analysis does usefully highlight the extent to which the idealisation of the emperor's authority and that of local aristocratic pre-eminence were mutually reinforcing.

Chapter 6, essentially a conclusion, reaffirms the political significance of the ‘ideological unification’ around the strategically useful ideal of ethical value and civic benefaction for most of the second century and its subsequent collapse. This widening of perspective to the behaviours and motivations of the curial class is indicative of the book's range and ambition. However, its greatest value lies in its detailed documentation of the rapid and geographically extensive dissemination of imperial ideals throughout the empire.