In this volume J. focuses on the legal patterns of the first few centuries of the Roman Empire. J.’s conclusion is that local legal events involving marginalised groups in the Roman Empire, including Jews, Christians, Egyptian cults, and diviners and astrologers, were not part of a systematic, top-down suppression of foreign cults. Gradually, the legal actions against them created precedents, but there was no clearly established procedure to establish rights or restrictions against them as standard practice that could be appealed through well-known legal authorities and channels. A significant, but perhaps subtle point in the book is the extent to which the lack of cogent empire-wide policies independent of the personal interventions of political officials allowed for regional variations and even regional influence over imperial agendas. By focusing on diviners, Jews and Christians as religious groups within the Roman Empire, J. seeks to illuminate how ‘marginalized’ religious groups could interact with the Roman legal framework.

J. considers the imperial period up to the middle of the third century ce to be an ‘important transitional period’ (p. 8) for Roman legal culture, aided in no small part by the underlying uncertainties of a legal entity that was recently reorganised from a republic, prone to changes in the top official, and expanding into other cultures with their own legal customs. J.’s focus is on events and narrated histories rather than on a broader treatment of inscriptions and other sources of imperial legal culture and political propaganda. The literary-historical perspective serves to define the status of diviners, Jews and Christians as ‘marginalised’ rather than simply ‘minoritised’.

Much of the contribution of the book is to balance the continuity and change of Roman law in terms of individual practitioners within delineated socio-religious groups. A. Bryen’s excellent recent work on Roman law has traced the economic effects on provinces subordinated to the developing demands of imperial administration, noting that the Roman Empire was ‘extractive’ in terms of treating places such as Gaul simply as a bread basket for the rest of the empire and reading Roman law with theorists such as P. Bourdieu. J. expands on attempts to discern structures and authorities within slippery Roman law, including the advisory role held by the Senate, the importance of divination during reigns such as that of Augustus, and the impact of jurists such as Gaius on the role of custom and the interaction of Roman laws, senatorial decrees, imperial orders and letters, and legal responses. Highlighted is the fact that Gaius’ Institutiones plays an outsized role as a second-century source uniquely preserved by later legal authors. J. notes that this work ‘appears to have been considered highly authoritative as is evidenced not only by its prominent presence in the Corpus but also by the fact that it is the only work by a Roman jurist to survive separately from the Digesta in an almost complete form’ (p. 17). Magistrates, according to Gaius, included aediles, provincial magistrates, and peregrine and urban praetors.

Thus, J.’s study places Augustan divination and sacred chickens in conflict with Judaism and Christianity and provides ambiguity for treatment of marginalised individuals and groups. On the one hand, control of predictive arts was used by elites to garner power for themselves. The story of Libo, as recounted by Tacitus, illustrates how the political intrigues of Roman elites used vague and ill-refined prohibitions of divination to advance their own personal political ambitions. J. finds that: ‘Generally, there does not appear to have been a connection to a concrete criminal act, and the diverse ways in which private diviners were treated, which included the possibility for recantation, furthermore suggests that the treatment of individual practitioners was frequently up for negotiation’ (p. 84). As this is a recurring theme in Roman administration (e.g. Pliny, Trajan), Roman sentiment towards diviners, Jews and Christians was dynamic rather than static, as some such as C. Moss have argued in considering the possibility of early Christian persecution and martyrdom.

At the same time J. is able to account for the experiences of Roman Jewish communities with events such as the expulsion of Jews from Rome as a group. J. claims that, ‘while neither Suetonius nor Tacitus explicitly mentions any alternative reasons for the expulsion, Cassius Dio claims that the Jews of Rome were expelled because they were actively attempting to spread their religion’ (p. 163). Though scholars coming from the perspective of the ‘Two Ways that Never Parted’ discourse within early Jewish and Christian scholarship have seen a blurring of communities, the Roman expulsion created from the Roman side of the ancient discussion the concept of a group of Jews that could be expelled without the possibility that the individual might differ or deserve a different fate than the group as a whole. While the Roman authorities, according to J., ‘appear to have been more concerned with proper procedures than with the religious beliefs of the people brought before them, which they appear to have considered an internal matter of Jewish communities’ (p. 241), this restraint in regarding religion seems to have the effect of strengthening juridical categories. Individual theology or lack thereof would not be able to overcome group identity.

Likewise, in Chapter 4, ‘Early Christianity in Roman Legal Measures’, J. demonstrates that a Roman interest in procedural law necessitated group recognition. J. shows that Trajan’s interactions with those ‘being Christian’ depended on those considered by Roman authorities to be the proper inhabitants of the province. This move allowed Roman provinces to feel themselves to have an illusory right to self-determination by designating some groups as marginal. Moreover, the need to wait for an imperial reply concerning legal treatment of Christians on the part of the provinces, which could take longer than the duration of a governorship, privileged Roman centralised response over local provincial action. As one local administrator, Granianus, was replaced by another, Minucius Fudanus, Roman centralised authority established the legal epistolary customs that would ensure that the group identities of central Roman elites, local Roman elites and marginalised groups such as Christians would not become entangled.

This is an exquisite contribution to studies on Roman law, Roman provinces, early Judaism and early Christianity. J. connects to previous scholarship on legal sources in early imperial Rome while forging new ground on how to consider Jewish and Christian marginalisation by Roman elite legal and literary discourse. It provides an important lens on how Roman legal mechanisms impacted Jewish and Christian group identities. Augustus’ obsession with individual divination yields to a second-century and third-century interest in group formation through legal categories that reinforced Roman centralised imperial authority over Roman provinces.