Trevor Luke's monograph takes as its inspiration Harriet Flower's recent paradigm-shifting work, Roman Republics (2010), which sees the period from Sulla to Augustus not as encompassing a single phenomenon (‘the fall of the Roman Republic’) but a complex sequence of Republics, each with its own distinct character. L. argues that the religious performance of departures from, and returns to, the city of Rome by the central figures of the period, which allowed them to construct ‘personal political theologies’, ‘contributed to the evolution of the Republic’ between 91 b.c.e. and 14 c.e. (1).

L.'s Introduction shows how Roman élites used competitive religious modes to vie with each other for prominence but also to solve crises — real, imagined or manufactured. Members of the Roman élite, whose magisterial rôles included religious functions, carefully constructed public personae for religious performances in order to lay claim to their suitability to hold the highest offices, to advance their political ambitions, to carve out a distinctive personal legacy and to promote the best interests of the state. Each figure L. discusses (with Sulla as the paradigm case) used arrival ceremonies in particular to stage religious performances promoting himself ‘as the “man of the saeculum”, a savior figure who was appointed by the gods and could bring an end to the great struggles of the age’ (17).

In ch. 1, L. establishes (without, alas, any attempt at Quellenforschung) that in his lost memoir/autobiography, Sulla constructed his departure from Rome to fight the Social War and his victorious return in 82 b.c.e. as religiously fated events, marked by prodigies and omens singling out Sulla as the saviour of Rome and inaugurating a new saeculum. L. is no doubt correct that this was done largely in response to Marius' own religious propaganda that made him seem like the favourite of the gods, and Fortune in particular. Ch. 2's discussion of the consulship of Pompey and Crassus (70 b.c.e.) and Pompey's recognitio equitum, incorporation of the Italians into the Roman citizen body and cultivation of Hercules seems far removed from the book's focus. It is only in the last few pages that everything is tied together along the lines established in the first chapter, such that Pompey, after suppressing the Spartacan and Sertorian emergencies, marked his return to Rome by constructing a personal political theology of Hercules, thus ushering in a new age, as attested by Cicero (Man. 13–16). This is not where the reader of the chapter in isolation would have expected it to go, which is a good indication that the book's overall subject matter needed to be better integrated into the discussion. Ch. 3 fares somewhat better, but although it is clear that Cicero manufactured the Catilinarian crisis to carve out a position for himself as the ‘man of the saeculum’ (89) and pater patriae, his ‘theologized’ moments of departure and arrival belong to his period of exile and return in 58–57 b.c.e. His return in 58 is theologized in his Post Reditum speeches by the use of the personification of Res Publica bringing him back, while the date of his return (5 August 57) was theologized with a focus on (re)birth since he landed at Brundisium on that city's birthday, which was also the birthday of his daughter Tullia and of the temple of Salus in Rome. ‘By noting this fortuitous coincidence, Cicero was prompting his [audience] to think of [his] return as a divinely appointed day of rebirth for his family, for Rome, and for Italy’ (107).

Ch. 4 attempts to apply L.'s thesis of personal political theology to Julius Caesar's monarchical pretensions. L. concludes that Caesar's theologized performance of an ovatio at the Feriae Latinae of January 44 indicates that Caesar did not intend to declare himself king. The remaining chapters treat Octavian/Augustus' theological self-representation. Ch. 5 interprets Octavian's return from the Sicilian war against Sextus Pompeius as a triumphant return of the saviour of the state, theologized as the triumph of Apollo over Neptune. Chs 6 through 8 and the Conclusion examine the Res Gestae, especially ‘the first thirteen chapters … as an extended arrival narrative’ (175). The pre-Actian arrivals in that document (sections 1–4) are cast in terms reminiscent of those of Romulus and Caesar, L. argues, whereas the post-Actian adventus (sections 9–13, documenting the arrivals of 19 and 13 b.c.e. and the three closings of the Gates of Janus) resemble those of King Numa Pompilius. But Augustus, as in so much else, also innovated in terms of theologies of arrival: he suppressed rather than emphasized the military successes that immediately preceded his adventus, and the adventus the Res Gestae records leads the reader on a journey to the Forum of Augustus where he is honoured not just as the saviour of the republic but as a deity in his own right.

L.'s approach to crisis-management and manufacture is an interesting one but, in my view, may not be applicable in all the cases he examines. Moreover, what he calls ‘personal political theologies’ used to be called, or at least was part of what used to be called, plain old ‘propaganda’; some discussion of the relationship between the two would have been salutary.