This volume, in the words of one of its editors, ‘englobe deux approches: l'examen de l'héritage césarien et celle de la mémoire de César par et sous Auguste’ (27). It envisages pursuing these approaches through a nice appreciation of how this inheritance and remembrance might shift across time (Julius Caesar in the triumviral period looks different from Julius Caesar after Actium (28)), place (the view of the provinces versus the view at Rome (27)) and, most signally, media. ‘Seul l'examen détaillé et minutieux des différents domaines du “siècle d'Auguste” (politique, conquête, administration, société, propagande et idéologie, art et littérature …) permet de donner une réponse adéquate’ (28).

This is a large and laudable goal, and not one easily consummated in a volume of slender compass. The editors and contributors are aware of this, and there are several nods towards the bulk and complexity of the relevant material, which preclude comprehensive results in a collection of this size. ‘Les réflexions suivantes ne prétendent pas donner un aperçu complet des positions fixées dans l'historiographie récente et plus ancienne sur le sujet ni répondre aux questions posées’, Karin Sion-Jenkis writes in her ‘Introduction historiographique’ (11). ‘… une réponse définitive à ce problème historique semble encore prématurée’, notes François Kirbihler, at the beginning of his study of Caesarian and Augustan policy-making in Asia (125).

One discerns, in this collection, a persistent tension between awareness of the enterprise's scale and the need for selectivity imposed by the limitations of space. The tension is perhaps most palpable in Marie Ledentu's chapter on the Caesar(s) of the poets. This quotes with approval Fr. Hurlet's vision of ‘une étude des auteurs augustéens, en particulier des poètes, dans une perspective historique’ ((147), quoting Hurlet, Anabases 6 (2007), 187–218, at 213), but restricts itself to Vergil, Horace and Propertius, ‘un corpus relativement unitaire’, she claims, ‘… qui appartiennent à la même génération’ (147). There is more than a touch of special pleading here. A ‘génération’ which contains a man who was twenty when Caesar crossed the Rubicon and another who was merely a glint in the eye of a local magnate at Asisium seems rather on the capacious side.

By way of contrast, the collection makes less use of Ovid than one might expect. Sion-Jenkis rightly accords the end of the Metamorphoses its due importance in her Introduction ((27), not a citation mentioned in the Index Locorum at the end of the volume). But preoccupation with named references to Julius Caesar himself means that some passages, interesting for the reception of the Dictator and his milieu in the times of his successor, slip through the gaps. There is no room for Ovid's veteran of Thapsus at the Ludi Megalenses (Ov., Fast. 4.379–84). While Ledentu makes good use of the quip about Brutus at Hor., Sat. 1.7.32–5 (154–5), there is no consideration of why, for example, Horace goes out of his way to drag Brutus' fellow-assassin Cassius of Parma and his literary productions into the poet's philosophical epistle to Albius (Hor., Epist. 1.4.3).

The collection notes from the outset an engagement with recent scholarship, particularly in German (11). Anglophone scholarship, on the whole, fares rather less well, even where it would have been pertinent to cite it. Syme's thesis that Augustus tried to disassociate himself from his adoptive father after 27 b.c.e. does receive much refutatory attention (e.g. 26–7) — arguably rather too much, in fact, since M. Toher in M. T. Griffin (ed.), A Companion to Julius Caesar (2009), 224–66, at 228–30, is already a lapidary counter-statement. On the other hand, one notable absence is the work of Christopher Pelling, though it is possible that his contribution to E. Cowan (ed.), Velleius Paterculus (2011), 157–76, appeared too late for Isabelle Cogitore to use it in her chapter on Julius Caesar in Velleius Paterculus (199–207). Much less significant is the omission of L. Pitcher in Griffin, A Companion, 267–76, by Olivier Devillers in his chapter on Caesar in Tacitus. While Pitcher anticipates some of what Devillers has to say about how Tacitus stresses political continuity between Caesar and Augustus (210), Devillers goes on to make further good points about Tacitus' separation of the two as military leaders (212).

There is much of interest in this volume, though usually more in the discussion of points of detail or particular passages than in larger assertions. Particularly thought-provoking moments are afforded by Gianpaolo Urso's bracing critique of the passages in Strabo that had previously been taken as indicating Strabo's clear Pompeian tendencies (187–8), and Paul Marius Martin's analysis of what the oft-repeated phrase ‘Caesar's heir’ actually means (43–53). Ledentu and Cogitore offer some pithy remarks on the Augustan poets and Velleius; Guillaume Flamerie de Lachapelle delivers an excellent close reading of Nicolaus of Damascus (177–86). César sous Auguste is not, and does not pretend to be, the last word on its subject; its method is, for the most part, confessedly provisional and impressionistic. Nonetheless, those interested in this ever more fashionable topic will probably find something in its pages to take their fancy.