M. describes his book as ‘a comprehensive basic introduction’ (p. 4) to Roman historiography, and the word that deserves emphasis is ‘comprehensive’. M. defines historical writing broadly (including, e.g., biography and exempla-literature and Christian chronicles), he includes writers in Greek as well as in Latin, and he surveys every author from the origins of historical writing in Rome in the third century b.c.e. through the age of Justinian in the sixth century c.e. The comprehensiveness of the book is easily discerned if one regards its chronological structure in thirds. The first third (pp. 1–84) focusses on the development of historical writing down to the end of the Republic, the middle third (pp. 84–170) assesses the traditional apex of Roman historiography from Sallust and Livy to Tacitus and Suetonius, while the final third (pp. 170–252) gives no less attention to the pagan and Christian writers of Late Antiquity. Sallust is covered in nine pages, and so is Orosius. Cato the Elder receives five pages, and Zosimus receives four. M.'s purpose is not to enshrine the most recognised Roman historians for their greatness, but to contextualise the whole of Roman historiography. For example, a perceptive transition (pp. 121–30) describing the differences between republican and imperial historiography is followed by fifteen pages on Tacitus that are set within twenty pages on Velleius Paterculus, Cassius Dio, Josephus and Appian (pp. 130–65). M.'s inclusivity provides the book's greatest strength, and I find it hard to imagine a reader who will not learn from his wide knowledge and reasoned synthesis.

M. presents Roman historiography as written within a set of literary and rhetorical traditions (described in Chapter 1 and contextualised in Chapters 2 and 3) that remained largely static, thus his accounting for the development of Roman historiography is built upon the changing cultural contexts of the historical authors. Each author is integrated within his period, but receives discrete treatment. His five pages on Josephus (pp. 157–62), for example, begin by stressing Josephus' unusual relationship with the Imperial house and the complications this entailed relative to other Jews. These complications introduce a discussion of Josephus' apologetic works, then the context for the Jewish War, followed by Jewish Antiquities and ending with the thorny question of the extent to which Christian interpolations were later inserted into Josephus' text. Politics and religion frame the discussion. M. focusses primarily on the original sources, though there is a bibliography for each chapter at the end of the book. The cumulative effect is somewhat encyclopedic, broken up by the overviews provided in the introductions to each chapter.

In the translator's preface, H.-F. Mueller notes that Anglophone readers ‘may feel some disorientation’ from M.'s German approach, in particular because M. ‘rescues more historical truth from ancient historiography than we have grown accustomed to expect’ (p. ix). Yet I found that M. handles the truth question honestly. He argues that the great majority of ancient historiographers rejected the scientific method of Thucydides and Polybius and thus ‘it always appears arbitrary where and how a Greek or Roman historiographer obtained his materials’ (pp. 27–8). After describing Cicero's requirements for historiography, M. claims that ‘truthfulness is reduced to a subjective element and a façade’ and concludes that ‘again and again and above all it is through literary and rhetorical means, primarily linguistic and stylistic in form, that Romans and Greeks produced a work of historiography’ (p. 81). Those who search the writings of Tacitus for truth will find ‘limited rewards’ (p. 151). M. argues instead that Tacitus' works should be read in light of his ‘difficulties in working through a phase of his own life’, namely his unforced participation in the administration of Domitian (p. 141). M.'s approach is somewhat positivist, therefore, but more about the biographical and political motivations of each writer than the historicity of what he writes.

What is puzzling, however, is the fact that M. does not privilege literary aspects even though they are presented as central to the construction of ancient historical accounts. He describes Tacitus as a writer of ‘tragedy in prose’ (p. 150), yet he does not explore how Tacitus achieves this tragedy by rhetorical and literary means. Nor does M.'s own rhetoric consistently follow his own earlier strictures against any assumed requirement of truthfulness and careful fidelity to sources: for example ‘To the extent, however, that ancient biography pursued [the aim of representing its subject's character], it ran the risk of removing historical personages from history, thereby sinning against historiography as conceived by a Polybius or from a modern perspective’ (p. 84), or ‘Arrian sacrificed the possibility of conveying real information on current affairs on the altar of literary tradition’ (p. 183), or ‘Although we may be inclined to criticize the making of epitomes from fuller narratives as a failed intellectual exercise, a careful consideration of all its aspects reveals that the practice does not deserve unilateral condemnation’ (pp. 187–8). Such comments are unnecessary and distracting.

A particular challenge for a book that moves across a wide subject involving a welter of specifics is the unavoidable use of generalisations. Many of M.'s are memorably apt: for example, ‘annalistic narratives of Roman history in its entirety are like a stream that from its source to its mouth grows continually wider’ (p. 101). But sometimes the overly bold formulation risks confusion. Fabius Pictor, for example, is both ‘merely a literary intermediary who wrote at the scene of his history's action’ (p. 45) and ‘not just the first Roman historical writer; he was the original founder who stamped several decisive qualities on all Roman historiography’ (pp. 47–8). The first claim sees him in the light of Greek antecedents, the latter in the light of his influence on subsequent writers, but if one is not attentive to this difference in perspective, one will find it hard to correlate such seemingly opposing claims within the space of a few pages. Similarly, M. declares that the civil wars of the last century of the Republic led to partisan history, since ‘historians could hardly come to these events objectively’ (p. 63), yet Sallust, ‘the period's most famous’ historian (p. 84), is then declared to hold ‘an independent political position that straddled the split between Optimates and Populares’ (p. 90). Sallust and Cicero, because they endorse ‘a new, more interior conception of fame’, are thus said to have ‘effectively proved that antiquity could no longer be rendered useful or relevant to the present’ (p. 65).

Then there are the small things to quibble over. I took umbrage, for example, at the description of Scaevola's compilation of the Annales Maximi as an ‘ahistorical book’ (p. 39), or the blithe assertion that Cicero published Lucretius' De Rerum Natura (p. 64), or the unquestioned acceptance of Sallust's invective against Cicero and letters to Caesar as genuine (pp. 85, 90). In a book with this much information presented in summary form, every reader will likely find claims that would seem to deserve more careful attention, but one can just as easily make a list of notable insights, for example the idea that Trogus consciously filled in around Livy's Romano-centric history (pp. 118–19), or the serious obstacles to imagining only one author behind the Historia Augusta (pp. 171–8), or the ways that Christian historiography incorporated the traditions of Roman historiography within its new and teleological view of history (pp. 216–23, 243–51). The strength of the book's synoptic power overshadows individually problematic details.