With this book Federico Santangelo has provided a much needed overview of the current state of research on public and private divination in the late Republic. In addition to surveying the various kinds of divination and divinatory thinking that circulated in this period, S. makes an original contribution to the study of Cicero's De divinatione.

A major strength of the book is the author's study of the De divinatione in chs 1–2. S. advances beyond the traditional debate about whether Cicero is ‘really’ for or against divination, arguing instead that the treatise constructs an opposition between that prophetic form of prediction which Cicero dubs divinatio and other forms of prediction and foresight (encapsulated by the term prudentia), including the political foresight that comes from an accurate reading of one's times. This way of reading the De divinatione yields much food for thought, and, by avoiding the tired categories of scepticism versus credulity, leads S. to a convincingly subtle and sophisticated reading of Cicero's play with the concepts of divination and foresight in letters such as that to Caecina (Fam. 6.6) and speeches like the Catilinarians.

Another significant contribution is the author's insistence throughout on the amount of debate about both divinatio and divination among Republican Romans themselves. The survey of types of divination in chs 3–7 (including dreams and cleromancy, haruspicy, the Sibylline Books and other Greek-style prophecies, and the possible socio-religious rôles of the vates and hariolus) resists the temptation to stereotype specific practices as élite or non-élite, or to lump practitioners into interest groups with particular political leanings. S. delights in tracing the great variety of ways in which even a single writer could use words such as divinatio or vates, and whilst the reader may sometimes wish for more signposts in the discussion, the point that there was an abundance of ‘diversity, creativity and experimentation’ in Roman uses of and thinking about divination, and that ‘Roman religious life cannot be regarded as a monolith or as a political construction dominated by manipulative elites, where no room was left for alternatives or variants to the dominant discourse’ (158–9), is an important corrective to the still-prevalent view of Roman divination as an aid to élite control.

Indeed, there were places where I wished that S. had gone further in allowing this vital insight to shape his treatment of specific historical cases of divination. It was unnecessary, surely, for S. to qualify the statement that ‘the senatorial elite was prepared to listen to [the haruspices]’ with the old-fashioned concession of ‘if for no other reason than to exploit their responses for the sake of the conflicting political agendas of its factions’ (98). Similarly, S.'s treatment of Antony's augural objection to the election of Dolabella in 44 b.c. (3, 273–8) acknowledges only briefly that the behaviour of those involved may have included a ‘religious aspect’, providing instead a purely political, one might say secular, narrative. In this respect one gets the feeling that although S. has grasped the crucial point that, as he elegantly puts it, ‘divination's strength and pervasiveness lay in defining a specific and meaningful relationship between divine and human’ (172), nevertheless the traditional view of Roman divination as a political tool has crept back into the narrative more often than it might have done.

I wondered a little, too, about how well the structure of the book would serve its intended audience. Whilst S.'s comprehensive and admirably up-to-date bibliography will be of value to all in this field, the surveys of types of divination (chs 3–7) and attitudes to divination and prediction in first-century authors (chs 8–11) seem more suited to readers trying to get up to speed on Roman divination. However, some chapters blur the boundaries between types of divination in a way that may be confusing to the non-expert. For example, the inclusion of Greek prophecies against Roman intervention in the Mediterranean (some legendary, some historical, and not all produced within the Sibylline tradition) in ch. 6 on the Sibylline Books, and of prodigies officially suscepta (in 207 b.c.) in ch. 7 on the vates, may well be misleading for readers who are not familiar with the distinctions drawn by the Roman state between these types of material. There is also the occasional error: for example, S. has twice (2, 146–7) confused C. Cato the tribune of 56 b.c. with M. Porcius Cato the quindecemvir, which leaves his otherwise interesting discussion of the Sibylline Oracle of 56 in need of revision.

That said, there is more than enough here to provide both the new and the experienced student of Roman divination with plenty of food for thought, and to strengthen the current renaissance of scholarly interest in ancient divination.