The French philosopher M. Merleau-Ponty argued that the physiological body was ‘the universal measurement’, one which allowed us access to the experiences of other cultures. The problem, of course, is that every culture gives its bodies a different scale against which physical experiences are interpreted and judged. This, as B. notes in her introduction, represents the fundamental problem of sensory studies: how is it possible to recreate the ways in which other cultures have experienced and understood the world. The title refers to D. Howes's reader on sensory studies, Empire of the Senses (2005), which called for a sensory revolution in the analysis of culture. This collection of essays, which brings together a wide variety of approaches to this ‘sensory turn’ in relation to the Roman world, stems from a conference held in 2013. The result is a high-quality, lively and inventive collection of essays, which will do much to stimulate further study in this field.

The introduction raises some of the theoretical issues involved in applying the sensory approach to the ancient world; these are then explored in a dozen chapters encompassing a wide range of contexts. The range covered by the essays is extremely broad, both temporally and geographically, and inevitably there are gaps, but overall the feel of the collection is very well-balanced. R. Laurence discusses the soundscape of the ancient city to highlight how subjective and varied the experience of sound is. B. contributes a chapter on the study of the sensory aspects of ancient artefacts. Materials, she argues, have specific properties that produce measurable physical effects, and many of these can be retrieved from ancient contexts. This might be overly optimistic. Laurence's preceding chapter had already emphasised how any experience is mediated through a range of individual biases. There is a risk also that some of the information obtained represents a kind of modern sensory antiquarianism. It may be true that we can extract from Seneca's famous letter written from above a bath-house that the sausage-seller's cry would have travelled between 67–118 m depending on the atmospheric conditions and that the smell of sausage would have travelled less than 17 m, but I am not convinced that the sausage-seller was ever anything more than a literary construct (as A. Vincent later notes). At its best, as B. shows, this kind of information can allow us to reconstruct plausible sensory maps of certain contexts in antiquity, but often it cannot easily be separated from the rhetorical purpose of the ancient text.

J. Veitch reconstructs the acoustics of the town of Ostia, T. Derrick puts together a smellscape for the fort of Vindolanda, arguing that various smells will have been emitted as the by-product of the various activities in a Roman fort, and V. Hope discusses the various sensory cues which permeated rituals concerning death and the longer-term grieving process, persuasively showing how the senses were used to create a differently experienced context to normality and thereby generate a sense of the other world into which the dead spirit was entering. E.-J. Graham's chapter is particularly insightful about the sensory meanings of terracotta votive models of infants wrapped in swaddling. Graham notes how the experience of handling these almost life-size objects is very similar to handling a real baby but also how this experience is counteracted by other sensory effects, such as that given by the terracotta material. There is, therefore, a sensory dissonance at work which allows the infant to exist at both a real and a representational level. H. Slaney's chapter on the kinaesthetics of the pantomime dancer is definitely the most avant-garde, suggesting practical exercises to be undertaken to get a feel of what it was like to be on the Roman stage.

A. Vincent studies the Roman tuba, analysing one particularly well-preserved instrument from Gaul. He then uses data-mining to look at all examples in Roman literature which describe the sound made by a tuba. B. also argues for the benefits of this kind of computer-aided analysis and, while it is commendably thorough, it does have limitations, not least concerning the size and representativeness of the surviving data-set. With so much of the surviving written evidence coming from such a small section of male society, such a technique cannot easily be used to recreate a wider set of cultural attitudes. This problem is also raised by M. Flohr's splendid reassessment of the sensory evidence relating to fullers. Often presented as the smelliest of artisans, Flohr, by a combination of close reading and archaeological reconstruction, shows how the reality was very different. While he may well be correct to argue that fullers were not perceived as being worse than other craftsmen in the eyes of elite writers, and that their trade suffered from no broad cultural stigma, it is still the case that a strong elite literary prejudice did exist against all those who worked with their hands for a living. Flohr's piece in many ways highlights how large a gap exists between the literary record and the reality.

The senses in the Roman world served to reflect and maintain the social hierarchy, and the book might have benefited from more on taste. Taste, perhaps above all, shows how the senses in a cultural context are always more than a biological function and concern matters of status, knowledge and wealth. Just as C. Weddle argues that taste in animal sacrifice served to set apart humans and gods, so too did it serve to classify mortals of different statuses. This comes out best in the chapter by I. Marshman, who examines the ways in which signet rings were used to establish both status and a kind of proxy-identity. Whether the rings were made of gold or iron, these rings reflected a society that was highly competitive and hierarchical at all levels.

It is always a problem of any cultural study that it risks smoothing over all this hierarchy. As the title of the book says, the senses were operating within an empire, and they played a fundamental role in helping to maintain power imbalances and promote ideology. J. Day's piece on the practice of sprinkling crowds with perfumed water in the amphitheatres (sparsiones) does an excellent job of re-examining the details of how this system operated and the ways in which saffron was used to create an almost religious feel to the games in order to promote the political aims of the hosts. It is striking how the early Christian martyrs adopted a sensory language to resist this kind of domination, portraying their burning victims as emanating smells every bit as good as those used to spray the crowds watching their executions.

In this excellent collection, we can see many of the ways in which the senses served as the conduit through which the exercise of power could flow, and overall it succeeds in taking the study of the senses in antiquity to a new level of theoretical insight and detailed investigation.