In this new study of Rome's oldest public space, Gregor Kalas treats the Roman Forum as a ‘“text” that was constantly under revision’ (18). But while structural repairs occurred at all periods, there was something distinctive about the ‘cultural significance of restoration’ in the fourth and fifth centuries: the deliberate reuse and conspicuous integration of older architectural elements expressed ‘reverence for the past’ (10) and was ‘the key strategy through which benefactors negotiated Rome's cultural position during the later Roman empire’ (11).

K. devotes two chapters to emperors (Tetrarchs; Maxentius and Constantine), two chapters to statues and two chapters to buildings. The themes of restoration and remembrance allow K. to describe the successive transformations of the Forum from an imperial space to one shaped increasingly by senators and finally by bishops. Because these élites all agreed that the Forum was a space that could be used to gain popular support, there was broad consensus throughout Late Antiquity that the built heritage of the Forum deserved to be maintained; élites recognized that they could enhance their own status by being seen as restorers of the Forum and guardians of its memories. This framework is an attractive alternative to traditional narratives of late antique decline and religious conflict.

K.'s execution of this well-conceived project is, however, decidedly mixed. One of its strengths is to highlight the variant meanings of ‘restoration’. For example, K. argues that the restoration of the Porticus Deorum Consentium (130–4) carried out by the urban prefect Praetextatus was actually a substantial reconfiguration that allowed for the cult statues to be displayed in the open air, where they could serve as a backdrop for processions and festivals; thus this ‘restoration’ was actually an essential update to bring the structure into better alignment with both contemporary needs and the changing legal status of pagan practices. A restoration of a different sort was carried out by an urban prefect at the Basilica Julia, who relocated a number of artworks to the basilica from elsewhere in the city; ‘restoration’ apparently could include redecoration achieved through the reinstallation or movement of statues, without any physical repairs to a building's structure (105–24). Other noteworthy contributions include a cogent argument for identifying the late antique ‘atrium Libertatis’ as the peristyle courtyard adjacent to the west side of the Curia (154) as well as intriguing remarks on the transformative power of inscriptions to transmit memories of senatorial names and reshape senatorial spaces into Christian sites (160).

It is at the intersection of architectural reconstruction and historical interpretation that some problems arise in K.'s readings of individual statues and monuments. Notably, K. treats the Tetrarchic rebuilding of the western and eastern rostra, together with the installation of the two facing ‘five-column monuments’, as the architectural expression of a new ‘cyclical concept of time’ (26) in which imperial successions were meant to follow at regular ten- and twenty-year intervals in perpetuity. The same theory underlies K.'s reconstruction of the statues displayed in the Curia: ‘Under the assumption that the imperial statues in the Curia referred to the persistence of the Tetrarchy as Diocletian envisioned it, it is likely that the four outer images were generic presentations of emperors that could have honored any member of the collegial system, rather than the likenesses of individuals’ (147). K. has to strain to make the Tetrarchy look more ordered and schematic than it was. He considers neither the possibility that the rebuilding of the Forum and Curia could have predated Diocletian's decisions about succession and abdication, nor that these projects could have incorporated senatorial influences.

K.'s treatment of textual evidence is unsophisticated. He tends to attribute outsized significance to rhetorical commonplaces or formulaic expressions (15, 147). Surprisingly, he imports Ammianus Marcellinus' biased judgements of Constantius II and the prefect Lampadius and uses them to characterize their dedications in the Forum as self-aggrandizing (81–5), although the language of these inscriptions actually parallels that of other dedications. He cites Lactantius (DMP 17.1–2) for the idea that Diocletian faced criticism from aristocrats during his visit in a.d. 303 (8, 39), but Lactantius specifies that it was the outspokenness of the Roman people that the emperor found intolerable.

Lastly, K. relies heavily on inscriptions. Unfortunately, his translations contain numerous errors, and his interpretations are often faulty, even to the point of misidentifying which emperor is meant (93, 106). An inscription from Verona is inaccurately described as containing a dedication to the emperors (123). K. several times repeats the bold claim that specific decisions about the type and location of statues set up to Honorius and Stilicho in the Forum originated with directives from the court (77, 81, 93), for which K. offers no evidence. Nor did the Senate dedicate a new bridge to the Valentinianic dynasty (85); the inscription states that the emperors ‘ordered’ the building of the Pons Gratiani.

The cumulative weight of these and other errors calls into question the reliability of the author's readings of individual monuments and requires that readers proceed cautiously and at times sceptically. Nevertheless, there remains much of interest and value in this book, certainly for specialists in the Roman Forum and late antique Rome and potentially for anyone interested in the culture of memory or relations between local élites and distant emperors in the later Roman Empire.