This issue's crop of books presents a strikingly diverse and geographically mobile ancient world. In this review we will travel from Britain to Arabia, taking in southern Iberia and Judaea en route, as well as considering the highly topical theme of migration. These books offer some fascinating new insights into the ancient world, as well as suggesting some intriguing historical perspectives on some of the most pressing issues of our present time.

I shall begin with an impressive collective monograph that has been expertly edited by Greg Fisher but contains the contributions of more than twenty scholars who represent not only a whole range of disciplines – history, philology, epigraphy, archaeology – but also specialisms in Greek, Roman, Persian, and Arabian history.Footnote ¹ This is necessary in a substantial study which looks at the pre-Islamic Arabs from the eighth century bce up to the seventh century ce. One of the particular selling points is the inclusion of nearly 250 extracts from ancient texts taken from a whole variety of sources, many appearing in English translation for the first time. The editor begins the brief introduction by noting the growing interest in pre-Islamic Arabia and the Arabians, which he rightly says is in large part due to the flourishing study of late antiquity, where traditional scholarly boundaries, including those of geography, have been so productively challenged. Of course, the work presented also draws on many of the recent advances in the study of early Islam, as well as new archaeological work from Syria, Jordan, and the Arabian peninsula. Nonetheless, the fact remains that the textual sources are very largely views looking from the ‘outside’, with ‘insider’ sources making up only a tiny proportion of the whole, as the Arabic literary tradition postdates the birth of Islam. Some of the most fascinating sources in the book are, nonetheless, inscriptions. These include samples of tens of thousands of graffiti from the deserts of northern Arabia, a number of very attractive monumental inscriptions from southern Arabia, and the fascinating Ruwāfa inscription, in Greek and Nabataean, marking the construction of a temple in honour of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus in 167–9, seemingly an isolated building in the desert in today's Saudi Arabia. The archaeological evidence from southern Syria is also very striking, demonstrating a particular flourishing of ecclesiastical architecture in the sixth century. It is indeed the late antique period for which the evidence, of all sorts, is at its richest, including hefty excerpts from Greek and Syriac chronicles and histories recounting the lengthy wars between Rome and Persia. The same period also provides fascinating evidence of religious diversity, as well as the important role of Christianity in political strategy in the region, as the Roman authorities sought to use Christianization as a means of gaining allies in the all-important border regions. This book will indeed be of particular interest for ancient historians interested in the interactions of the Roman Empire with other empires, and it serves as an important reminder that we would do well to seek to understand the history of the Roman Empire in its Eurasian context.

The challenges of looking at peoples and cultures from external sources are also addressed in what is the first English-language monograph on the early civilization of Tartessos in southern Spain,Footnote ² which, the authors admit, is generally known, if at all, ‘as no more than a semi-legendary classical name or a footnote for the Phoenician and Carthaginian western enterprises’ (vii). Indeed, my own ignorance about Tartessos before opening this book was almost complete, but this fascinating account makes a convincing case for why classical scholars should care about this civilization, which did not survive a crisis of the sixth century bce and in its scholarly afterlife was once unfortunately (but with lasting effect!) identified with Atlantis. The co-authors, Sebastián Celestino and Carolina López-Ruiz, provide a highly readable and methodologically sophisticated account of Tartessos and the history of its study. The first chapter, looking at the role of Tartessos in the construction of Spanish identity from the ‘Catholic Kings’ to the post-Franco period, will be of interest to many. Careful unpickings of the classical literary traditions and the archaeological evidence follow, including analysis of settlement, trade, religion, art, and technology, always placing Tartessos in its broader cultural and economic landscape. The picture that emerges is one of ‘a local culture of archaic Iberia’ (309), which must be understood with reference to a highly connected Mediterranean and indeed Atlantic world, where hybridity was the result of the interaction of various cultures.

The nature of cultural contacts is very much at stake in the new Oxford Handbook of Roman Britain,Footnote ³ which provides a clear status quaestionis in a field which has been revolutionized in recent years. The traditional study of Roman Britain, dominated by considerations of military history and driven by classical historiographical accounts, has in recent years been largely transformed, with new perspectives driven not least by the flourishing in Britain of more theoretical archaeological approaches. (Indeed, reading this book as a Classicist leads to a vague sense of guilt, as classically trained scholars are regularly blamed for their role in developing and perpetuating a lasting blinkered, elitist, and Romanocentric view of Roman Britain!) The handbook's forty-one chapters are authored not just by such key figures in the re-evaluations of Roman Britain as Martin Millett and Richard Hingley but also by a whole new generation of young scholars. The editors tell us that they deliberately avoided the chronological structure traditional in works on Roman Britain; the only chronological account is given very briefly indeed in the introduction.Footnote ⁴ The chapters are instead grouped into four parts: ‘Nature of the Evidence’, ‘Society and the Individual’, ‘Forms of Knowledge’, and ‘Landscape and Economy’. Although reflections on the history of the subject are present throughout, the most explicit consideration comes in Part 1, which reminds us of the crucial influence that institutional as well as political developments have on archaeological scholarship. This discussion also includes a fascinating study by Ellen Swift of the development of artefact studies (Chapter 4), showing the predominance of women in this field, due not least to the traditionally low prestige given to this area of archaeology. It is difficult to single out chapters from such a large selection, but in the context of this issue's review it is worth pointing out just a few. Simon Esmonde Clearly (Chapter 7, ‘Britain at the End of Empire’) argues that we must avoid the tendency to look at Britain in isolation and examines Roman military withdrawal in the context of developments on the continent. As already noted, discussions of how we should conceptualize cultural change are present throughout, and we are reminded in Chapter 8 (‘Britain before the Romans’, Timothy Champion) just how artificial 43 ce is as a watermark in our understanding of cultural change. Mobility both into and out of Roman Britain forms the focus of several chapters (10–12), which paint a picture of a fascinatingly diverse and mobile Roman Britain. ‘Brits’ abroad were most unlikely to represent themselves as such (reminding us again of the difficulty of using etic and indeed invented identities), although we can trace ‘British’ material culture (in the form of brooches) far more widely. Meanwhile, migration into Roman Britain has been examined not just through study of material culture but also, fascinatingly, through the isotopic analysis of skeletal remains. The results of these studies, from five urban sites, cannot, the authors tell us, be taken as representative, and yet they do produce a striking headline figure: that 20–30 per cent of those analysed came from outside Britain. Overall, this volume does an excellent job of clearly presenting what are often highly striking recent discoveries and perspectives on Roman Britain, which appears here as a very lively and innovative field of study, with something to teach even fusty old Classicists, no doubt.

The subject of mobility and migration is central to the next book, which focuses on migration to the city of Rome during the Early Empire.Footnote ⁵ While scholars of migration history have sometimes (and influentially) understood migration to be a characteristic of modernity, Laurens E. Tacoma is keen to demonstrate the prevalence and significance of mobility in the Roman world, and to understand it in its societal context. Much of Roman mobility, as we are well aware, was of course due to the slave trade. Tacoma argues that we need to understand forced and voluntary migration together, as separate ends of a continuum, and this decision crucially underpins his analysis throughout the book: for instance, in his discussion of slave and ‘free’ labour as ‘in many respects structurally equivalent’ (7). In Chapter 2 he works through his strategies for estimating the total number of (im)migrants – based on the analysis of epigraphy and on isotope analysis from skeleton remains, alongside what he calls ‘controlled speculation’. We end up with an estimate of around 20–30 per cent – fascinatingly in line with the figures from the sites in Roman Britain. (More fascinating still, we can compare this figure with modern Britain: in 2014 36.7 per cent of London's population was foreign-born, as was 13.1 per cent of the UK as a whole.Footnote ⁶ ) The subject of migration entails discussion of several of the key topics in Roman demographic, social, and economic history, including the nature of the Roman family (Chapter 4), an in-depth consideration of the ‘urban-graveyard’ theory for ancient Rome (Chapter 5), and the openness (or otherwise) of the Roman labour market (Chapter 6). Cultural questions, regarding how far we can use the idea of ‘diaspora’, are also critical (Chapter 8) to the study of migration. Tacoma concludes here that ‘community ties were relatively weak; there is little sign of the formation of migrant communities in a real sense’ (206), although the Jewish community does present a different picture, suggesting the presence again of a ‘continuum’. This is a carefully argued study and indeed one might have hoped for some less cautious ideas to be presented in the final section of the book's conclusion (‘Some implications’). Still, this well-constructed picture provides another powerful reminder that the ancient Roman world was both highly mobile and highly diverse.

While the Jews made up the most materially visible minority in ancient Rome, evidence for the Roman ‘conquest’ of Judaea would also have been highly, and intentionally, visible during the imperial period. Steve Mason's hefty and powerful new book aims, not least, to unmask the Flavian version of this victory, while also, ambitiously, offering a new reading of the war and its causes, all the while reflecting on the practice of history itself.Footnote ⁷ The result is a provocative and indeed radical re-examination of much that we thought we knew about the Judaean War (a term Mason convincingly argues to be far more accurate than ‘Jewish War’). Chapter 1, ‘A Famous and Unknown War’, sets up the key themes of the book nicely, while establishing Mason's sharply critical eye. The Flavian regime, he tells us, presented a fantastical version of the war, sharply at odds with the reality. For all of the ingenuity of Alföldi's uncovering of the inscription announcing that the ‘spoils’ of the war had funded the Colosseum, Mason argues that this is basically impossible: what valuable spoils could ‘a remote region of an existing province comprising mainly desert and villages’ (35) have produced? The fall of Jerusalem was indeed of great significance – in the making of the Flavian dynasty of course, but most fundamentally to Jews, though also to Christians in terms of their self-representation and understanding. However, Mason argues that, as a conflict, the Judaean War has been largely misunderstood. Chapter 2 provides a useful contextualization of the work of Josephus in the broader context of ancient historiography and its intensely rhetorical nature as we are asked to consider history as a ‘process’ (62). Chapter 3 completes the contextualization by looking at the Roman army and the regional context. In Chapter 4, the fundamental arguments that will be developed throughout the rest of the book are laid out. Along with Werner Eck, Mason argues that ‘Judaea’ was not a province that revolted: it was instead a region of Syria which became a province only as a result of the successful put-down of the revolt. The idea that the revolt was due to an innate long-felt anti-Roman ideology is rejected: Mason says that Judaeans were on good terms with the Romans as a whole (causing resentment among the Samarians in particular). The war was, instead, the result of specific events and tensions – the bad behaviour of the procurator Gessius Florus, and the Roman failure to deal properly with this problem, constituting the key trigger. We are taken through these arguments in what follows, looking at how a conflagration of issues and events led to what would become the ‘Judaean War’. Mason argues (Chapter 6) that no-one could have known that this was a ‘Judaean–Roman war’ in ad 67: this only became clear in hindsight. There is much more to the book's arguments than can reasonably be dealt with in such a short review but there are many interesting ideas and refutations of long-held views that should be briefly noted: the archaeological evidence shows that most of Galilee did not put up a fight (Chapter 6); Zealots were not ‘zealots’ as we think of them (Chapter 7); the Flavians were risk averse and did not want to hazard Roman lives (Chapter 7). When we get to Jerusalem (Chapter 8) we are not spared the reality of what would happen ultimately: excavations of the Upper City have shown the intensity of the destruction that ensued, including columns that burned at a heat of 800 degrees, some coated in bone dust, both animal and human. And yet, Mason suggests, Titus did not set out to destroy the Temple, even though he ended up doing so (giving, as a striking modern parallel, the monastery of Monte Cassino, destroyed in 1944). Next we go to the iconic site of Masada (Chapter 9), but here a new picture emerges: first Masada was not the only site to hold out in this way (there are three such cases in total), but, most intriguingly, archaeological evidence gives a picture of Masada as a community of refugees (including many families) rather than (just) of implacable ‘zealots’. Indeed, Mason suggests that people didn't go to Masada to fight but in order to avoid fighting. We can't know what actually happened there, but what is clear is the use made of it by Josephus, whereby the story, notably the moving speeches of Eleazar, becomes a fitting end-piece for his long meditation on political freedom in Judaea, ‘radical programmes that ended only in death’ (575). There is much to chew on in this thoughtful and provocative book, and it is to sure to stir a good deal of debate.

After such a large and imposing volume, I shall more briefly consider two rather more slender volumes, both sourcebooks, which present themselves for use in the undergraduate classroom, both dealing with perennially popular topics. The first focuses on ‘daily life’:Footnote ⁸ Brian K. Harvey presents nearly 350 ‘sources’, largely comprising extracts from literary and documentary texts and inscriptions, but also including a number of plans and photographs. All translations are newly made by the editor and are nicely clear and student-friendly. Explanatory material, clear if not extensive, is generally also included. The categories under consideration – the structure of society, the family, business and occupations, public entertainment, housing, virtue and vice – are sensible. The section on children has some particularly interesting material, not least on the subject of contraception: Pliny the Elder's account of the use of worms found inside large spiders as a contraceptive is horribly fascinating (no. 80). The wide selection of inscriptions is very welcome and includes some fun and intriguing examples – one wonders, for instance, what had gone on that had caused a freedman to be specifically prohibited even from walking near his former master's tomb (no. 133)! The categories under consideration are, however, certainly not ground-breaking, and indeed might be thought rather too traditional. For instance, ‘women’ appear but not ‘gender’ or ‘sexuality’. Meanwhile, the scope of the chapter on religion seems rather dated: no attention is given to Judaism, with Jews being summarized as follows: ‘The continuous insistence of Jews and Christians to worship their own deity and reject all other gods, including those of the Romans, alienated them from Roman society’ (211). Nonetheless, this is a very keenly priced volume which would work well in the classroom, though students would undoubtedly need more contextual information to enable them to make the most of much of the very interesting material contained here.

The second example deals with everybody's favourite ‘bad emperor’, Nero; he has received the compliment of a highly superior sourcebook produced by several very eminent scholars (the sad loss of Elaine Fantham in 2016 should here be noted).Footnote ⁹ Again, fresh translations are provided of what are very largely literary sources. The editors explain that they have chosen to provide ‘extensive annotation’ as so much ancient literature ‘is a baffling mystery to the student and to the general reader (and often to the classical scholar)’ (vii). Indeed, the introductory and contextual matter and footnote discussion provided are exemplary – one example is the clear discussion of the difficulties posed by Tacitus’ description of the persecution of Christians after the Fire of Rome, but I could give many others. This well-priced sourcebook will empower undergraduates to attain an impressively in-depth understanding of the issues raised by the reign of Nero and the sources, and it is to be strongly recommended to my fellow teachers of Roman history.

Finally, and also briefly, it is worth noting a revised issue of one of the most debated works of Roman history in recent years: Edward Luttwak's Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire.Footnote ¹⁰ It is now more than thirty years since the defence strategist delivered his provocation to the field of Roman studies, with its bold claims about the changing nature of Roman military strategy under the Empire. As Luttwak himself notes in his new preface, his book occasioned an extremely lively response. Fundamental objections were made by a number of scholars to his main arguments: most centrally, first the very existence of a ‘grand strategy’ and second the claim of a switch from an expansionist, aggressive foreign policy to one of ‘defence in depth’ in the Later Roman Empire. In this new edition, the author presents himself as fundamentally unrepentant. He has taken the opportunity to make corrections and updates, including an updated bibliography (with ‘selected reviews’ of the first edition), and engages with his critics at various points, but maintains strongly that overall his arguments still hold. Luttwak's new reflections on the points of contact and contrast between ancient and contemporary warfare and strategy remind us once more, as if we needed reminding, of the important interpretive ties that bind the Roman world to our own.