Rhetoric is a slippery term. In common parlance it can pertain to: oratory, the systematic study of persuasion, the medium that conveys an ideological message as well as the ideological message itself. When Lamp analyses Augustan visual culture as rhetoric, she at various points means all of these. The metonymic slide from one to the other responds to a genuine problem, that extricating form from content, an object of study from the discourse that studies it, is notoriously complicated. L. convinces with a series of discrete, but interconnected arguments: Augustan visual culture occupied the void left by changes in rhetorical practices, particularly in deliberative oratory at the collapse of the Republic; the material artifacts of this period can be productively analysed by analogy with epideictic oratory; ideological messages are well conveyed by visual media; ancient rhetorical theory understood the importance of visual as well as verbal communication; Augustus masterfully controlled a legitimating myth conveyed by visual media and through which he communicated with his people, who responded by appropriating the visual code for their own self-legitimation. She furthermore does a good job of synthesizing current opinion on the ideological message conveyed by Augustan art. L.'s most original argument, however, namely that all of these aspects need analysis through the lens of rhetoric, somehow underwhelms.

Why? L. addresses two scholarly audiences, those interested in Classics for its own sake and those interested in rhetoric as a modern field, for whom the ancient material provides one instance of a larger phenomenon. The latter is, in fact, the field in which she holds advanced degrees and I suspect it is her target audience. I can speak only for the classicists, but from our perspective the analysis of the materials themselves offers little that is new, and the rhetorical frame needs more rigorous articulation into its component parts. An introduction laying out the interrelation of the different aspects going under rhetoric's capacious umbrella, and greater specificity at the level of the sentence about which aspect she means in any particular instance,would go a long way to raising what is really an ingenious idea to a more persuasive level. Despite my reservations about the book's execution, let me emphasize that in the end I think L. is right. Augustan visual culture communicates rhetorically in any number of senses, conceptualizing its communicative method as epideictic is a useful contribution, and such conceptualization helps distinguish it from Republican practice. L. makes a welcome contribution by bringing a range of related issues together. As always, a new frame elicits further questions. Why did Augustus turn to the visual at this particular moment and what are the communicative advantages of material discourses? How and why did verbal expression become inadequate to bear the message? Is the visual field the primary sphere of Augustan political messaging or is it supplemental?

L. uses as a springboard some remarks by George A. Kennedy, The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman World (1972), in which he identifies Augustan art as rhetorical (2, 155). She sprinkles references to modern rhetorical theory throughout the book. To it she owes concepts such as ‘political myth’ and ‘vernacular discourse’, which usefully describe Augustan ideology and its uptake by people lower down the pecking order as a way of integrating themselves into broader structures of power. If its target audience is in fact modern scholars of rhetoric, L. does a superlative job of classical outreach. She brings antiquity in a very accessible package to non-specialist, but interested, readers for whom the technicalities of Classics are surely off-putting. The book is well illustrated and clearly written. Many of the chapters, particularly those on the Augustan political myth, coinage and the altars of the Lares Augusti could well be assigned to undergraduates in a course on Augustan culture, if the comparable treatments in P. Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (2003) and K. Galinsky, Augustan Culture (1988) seem too long.