This book investigates the relationship between the late Roman senatorial aristocracy and the city of Rome. M. sets out a range of evidence from Rome – with epigraphy featuring most prominently – to illustrate changes in how Roman aristocrats interacted with the public and private spaces of the city across the period ad 270–535. The book's primary argument revolves around how the city of Rome featured in senatorial efforts at ‘enhancing and preserving their standing in late antique society’ (p. 2). As the political and religious setting changed, Rome's elite families – sometimes individuals in the same family across multiple generations – adapted their strategies of self-representation and, in the process, altered the topography of Rome.

From the outset, M. makes it clear that the study concentrates on the clarissimus class, the city of Rome and the period 270–535. The decision to limit the study to the clarissimi is probably the most controversial of these limitations; the geographical and chronological boundaries are practical as much as they are ideological, limiting the project to a manageable scope. M. acknowledges that groups other than the clarissimi contributed to the evolving face of late antique Rome (p. 4), but, as he points out, ‘no other group was as intimately involved in all aspects of city life’. Moreover, no other group enjoys a comparable level of attestation in the surviving evidence for the period under consideration. While the senatorial aristocracy of Rome undoubtedly remains the main focus throughout the book, the relationship between this group and others in the city still comes up with some frequency. After all, it is practically impossible to discuss ‘aristocratic power’ without looking at how it affected those who wielded it and those subject to it. For example, discussions of important subjects such as the annona, late antique urban riots and the patron–client relationship necessarily involve consideration of how senators interacted with other Romans. Such interactions took place in real physical settings within the city of Rome, and M. explores how many of these – forum spaces, domestic neighbourhoods and houses, gradus etc. – were adapted to meet the evolving requirements of the urban elite.

The book is divided into three main sections, flowing (in general) from public to private expressions of power and status (p. 22). Part 1 (Chapters 1 and 2) sets the stage, laying out the late antique city's political and physical topography. A key change that M. identifies in this section is the expansion of the authority of the urban prefect. With this and other changes to the imperial administration, the senatorial aristocracy took on new roles in the urban administration. This in turn led to shifts in the ‘topography of power’, with new spaces such as those associated with the urban prefecture or with the annona rising in prominence.

In Part 2 (Chapters 3–5) M. investigates ‘the Uses of Space’. Chapter 3 outlines the evolution of the Roman Forum, the old heart of the city, which saw the gradual erosion of imperial investment and its replacement with more local expressions of authority. In Chapter 4 M. looks at the city's ‘Festivals, Ceremonies, and the Commemoration of Power’, highlighting the ways in which aristocrats celebrated and enhanced their standing in key areas of the city. Chapter 5 traces the Christianisation of Rome and the role of the senatorial elite in that process, alongside evidence for the continuation of pagan traditions ‘until a very late date’ (p. 163). As a whole, Part 2 highlights the complexity of Rome's transformation across the fourth and fifth centuries. This central portion of the book also illustrates how Rome's senatorial elite managed to navigate the changing political and religious landscape of this period.

Part 3 (Chapters 6 and 7) shifts to ‘Domestic Spaces and the Privatization of Power’, though M. rightly notes that the idea of public vs private commemoration is more significant in modern times than in antiquity (pp. 201–3). Setting up statues of one's celebrated ancestors inside the home was of course a form of private commemoration, and yet because of the semi-public nature of at least certain areas of the aristocratic domus, such statues were certainly intended for a wider audience than the immediate household and even close friends and associates. In late antiquity, possibly even more than under the Republic or early Empire, the ‘domus was at the core of an aristocrat's power’ (p. 228). Part 3 thus details some of the archaeological evidence for houses identified as belonging to Rome's senatorial families, exploring what these sometimes palatial complexes tell us about social and political interactions within the late antique urban domus.

M. has produced an enjoyable and stimulating book, which is both well written and carefully researched. M. offers a welcome new perspective on a variety of more or less well-known evidence from late antique Rome. M.'s emphasis on aristocratic agency in the evolution of Rome's urban spaces provides a coherence that helps to make sense of disparate and often fragmentary sources of information. For example, few readers will be completely unfamiliar with the correspondence of Quintus Aurelius Symmachus. By reading these letters in the light of Rome's contemporaneous archaeological record, M.'s analysis provides for a deeper understanding of the relationship between Roman senators and their city – conceived in physical, social and religious terms. There may be a danger of pushing the evidence for this one family too far, extrapolating from a single example to the full clarissimus class. And it is true that the Symmachi have left behind an unusual confluence of evidence – literary, archaeological, epigraphic and even historical references. To address this issue, M. includes a number of parallel examples, supported by more fragmentary but still sound evidence, to argue that although Symmachus and his family represent an atypical level of success, they were by no means unique in their pursuit and expressions of power. Other senatorial families could and did leave their mark on the late antique city of Rome, among them the Anicii, Aproniani, Bassi and Valerii. M. is almost certainly correct that many more families participated in the forms of competitive self-representation and political jockeying so clearly illustrated in the family of the Symmachi.

Although this book's main lines of argument are aimed at the city of Rome specifically, the analysis engages with some of the most interesting issues in late antique studies, among them aristocratic and imperial involvement in the creation of the Christian city, religious continuity and change, domestic and public building and maintenance, urban unrest and social conflict, and of course aristocratic self-representation. As a result, the themes investigated and the approaches followed are readily transferable, and scholars working in other areas of the late antique Mediterranean will find much of value. A comprehensive analysis of urban space and aristocratic power in late antique Rome is certainly an ambitious undertaking. There is no shortage of studies on individual aspects of the city's public topography or on specific monuments and types of evidence. But in bringing a wide range of sources to bear on the theme of urban space and aristocratic power, M. has crafted a valuable new resource for scholars of late antique Rome in particular and for those studying late antique urbanism more generally.