Roman History

After a focus on social and cultural history in the last issue, this issue's offerings return us to more traditional subjects – political institutions, and historiography. That spring review ended with religion, which is where we start here: an apposite reminder that religion pervades all aspects of the Roman world. It is precisely that principle which undergirds our first book, Dan-el Padilla Peralta's Divine Institutions.¹ Padilla Peralta is interested, at root, in how the Roman state became such through the third and fourth centuries bce. That is a story usually told – in a tradition going back to the ancient historians themselves – via a swashbuckling tale of successive military campaigns. Padilla Peralta, however, sets that anachronistic narrativization aside, and instead builds a careful case that between the siege of Veii and the end of the Second Punic War ‘the Roman state remade and retooled itself into a republic defined and organized around a specific brand of institutionalized ritual practices and commitments’ (1). Specifically, he shows that the construction of temples and the public activities they facilitated were a key mechanism – one as important as warfare – by which the consensus necessary to state formation was generated:

the Republic more or less stumbles into a bootstrapping formula that proves to be unusually felicitous: high visibility monumental enterprises are paired with new incentives for human mobility in ways that dramatically and enduringly reorganize the rhythms of civic and communal experience. (17–18)

In particular, Padilla Peralta argues that output was greater than input; that the genius – whether accidental or deliberate – of this formula was that it facilitated a confidence game whereby the res publica appeared more capable – via the apparent support of the gods whom its visible piety secured – than was in fact the case.

This case emerges in four substantive chapters, housed into two overall parts, preceded by an introductory first chapter. Part I, ‘Build’, treats the investment in monumental cult in two chapters. Chapter 2 attempts to quantify the commitment to temple-building in the Middle Republic, and to model its consequent labour demands in person-hours. Padilla Peralta demonstrates that in this period the Romans built religious structures not, as in other periods, at the upper end of their financial and engineering capacity, but little and often (‘repetitive smallness’, 32). Moreover, the much smaller cost, when compared with that of comparable activities – war-making, primarily, but also other grand construction projects (e.g. the Servian Wall, renovation and construction of the Aquae Appia, Anio Betus, and Marcia respectively) – makes it clear that

the middle Republic's allocations of labour to the construction of many small temples fell in a Goldilocks zone of state (trans)formation: enough to yield a monumentally impressive and socially meaningful outcome without obstructing military mobilization or triggering significant political unrest. (64)

This mode of temple-building thus simultaneously served, via ‘restrained conspicuous consumption’ (43), to manage intra-aristocratic competition at Rome, and was a key aspect of the ‘shell game’ – whereby low input produced disproportionately large output – that disguised the far greater cost of military engagements to the Roman people.

Chapter 3 looks at the consequences of that construction, and in particular its ‘role in promoting and consolidating the quasi-voluntary social compliance that bound the res publica together’ (79). The new proliferation of temples created a new set of moments, on the one hand, where Rome's population needed to act and work together, and of services, on the other, accessible both to the city's residents and its visitors. Padilla Peralta argues in particular that the expectation that some of the wealth gained from campaigns would go towards temple construction helped demonstrate that warfare yielded common goods, thus prompting the collective buy-in required for those campaigns to continue. Temple construction also helped crystallize the developing authority, role, and cohesion of the Senate (perhaps best exemplified by the Temple of Bellona, which became one of the first sacred spaces in which that body met). In similar fashion, the new temples became the centre of both fire- and flood-prevention efforts and a civic health programme: another shell game that used a manageable deliverable (constructing a temple) to imply control over unmanageable ones (disaster and disease). Around the temples a festival culture grew, encompassing at least seven major ludi plus minor versions, which helped restructure civic time, and in so doing bound the community and its leaders together in a new shared form of necessary knowledge. Thus the temples were in multiple ways key to the development of the ties of trust – both between elites, and between elites and the rest of the populace – that in practice made the Republic, because they engendered the ‘quasi-voluntary compliance that prevented the res publica from flying off the rails’ (109).

Part II, ‘Socialize’, turns to considering how these temples and their surrounding para-structures ‘boosted the formation and strengthening of new circuits of human mobility that, over time, restructured individual and communal understandings of what it meant to identify as a subject of Roman rule’ (128). Chapter 4 focuses on the ways in which festivals enabled a ‘traffic in knowledge’ (132), not just of the past, or of the aristocracy's claims to significance, but of other participants. The volume of temples, and thus of festivals, meant that a large proportion of civic time was dedicated to such information exchange. This was in part because of the importance of theatrical performance to these festivals. As Padilla Peralta says, ‘The propagation of shared knowledge in festival contexts familiarized Latin and non-Latin allies with what was believed to make Rome special, facilitating their quasi-voluntary compliance with the demands of the mid-republican state in the process’ (139). These were, he argues, at least as important as, if not more important than, those spaces – predominantly military – traditionally considered the key sites for such interactions. This chapter is distinctive for its focus on literary material. Padilla Peralta considers first the Hellenized Roman drama of, for example, Naevius and Plautus, whose simultaneously religious and pedagogical content speaks to its origin at precisely this historical moment, in this new landscape of proliferating temples. Close readings of Callimachus demonstrate the impact of this new Roman phenomenon on ‘outsiders’. The overall message, to internal and external audience alike, was clear:

the various component elements of this praxis come together to enact one coherent message, with unwavering pitch and intensity: Rome was a theocracy; its gods oversaw and legitimated the partitioning of the world into statuses of freedom and unfreedom whose calibration and refinement it was the exclusive responsibility of the imperial Republic to arbitrate. (165)

Moreover, the drama enacted at these festivals also spoke to the experience of the colonial project, so that, in a sense, ‘the Roman state was effectively underwriting the costs of large-scale group therapy’ (166), as well as ‘normalising the practice of enslavement as a defining element of Rome's imperial identity’ (174).

Chapter 5 turns to the role played by these temples and festivals as a catalyst to pilgrimage, and thus as ‘institutional movers of men’ (180). By attempting to quantify the flow of pilgrims to Rome from the rest of the Italian peninsula via a close study of both the anepigraphic anatomical votives – for scale – and the inscribed pocola ceramics (glossed in an annotated appendix at 247–55) – for dynamic – Padilla Peralta is able to demonstrate the ubiquity and range of the movement that this new religious culture facilitated. Then, in turn, by subjecting that data to social network analysis, he shows how this movement translated into the manifold concrete interactions which cumulatively made up ‘the interactive and repetitive procedures by which trust between social actors was strengthened and perpetuated’ (228). This was the Roman state in the making. A concluding chapter applies the conclusions of the previous chapters to one religious phenomenon characteristic of our period – prodigy expiation – which are better explained on this model than otherwise. It also demonstrates, via another experimental model, that the amount of civic time committed to religious activities far exceeded that committed to politics, and thus seeks to defend the claim that the processes outlined in this book can be considered a major contribution to the creation of the Roman Republic.

This book is, simply, a wonderful work of ancient history. It sits within a burgeoning trend of works that prioritize material evidence and theory to construct viable alternatives to the dominant linear narratives of traditional historiography.² Its regular efforts towards quantification via experimental modelling belie its origins as a Stanford dissertation. But this is combined with traditional highly sensitive readings of literary material. Padilla Peralta thus demonstrates a wide scope and sure touch in equal measure as he moves between poetry, little-known material evidence, quantification methods, digital tools, and sociological, anthropological, and economic theory. In each he demonstrates impressive technical knowledge and skill, and – though this is not a read for the non-initiate – a lightness of touch that avoids getting bogged down in any one area, and so weaves the threads into a whole much greater than its parts. He is unintimidated by the difficulties of attempting quantification with a fragmented archive, and this refreshing bravery in exploring apparently intractable problems via ‘judicious speculation’ (239) makes for an exciting and provocative read. And the choice to focus on case studies produces a nice balance between fine-grained detail and overarching argument, leaving the reader with not just the overall payoff of a case well made, but the promise on every page of some small insight on any particular specialist topic. There is no doubt more work to be done – as Padilla Peralta himself observes (61), for example, the Monte Carlo method of statistical analysis would improve the various attempts at quantification – and his admirable provision of the underlying data via the Princeton website means that his conclusions can be honed, contested, and developed. But Divine Institutions already makes a seminal contribution not just to the study of the Roman Republic, but to the writing of ancient history more generally.

A different kind of divine institution takes centre stage in Crossing the Pomerium, a new study from one of Padilla Peralta's Princeton colleagues, Michael Koortbojian.³ Less an exhaustive monograph, more a collection of four thematically aligned lectures, Koortbojian's interdisciplinary book, the result of his work over two decades, explores the complexities surrounding what is often treated as an unproblematic geographical boundary, the pomerium, but which in fact was a juridical and religious concept that proved difficult to pin down even for writers in antiquity (4, 11). Koortbojian's interest is in challenging easy scholarly assumptions about what was possible or allowed when military commanders left or returned to Rome, and in demonstrating change over time in the extent to which traditions and expectations influenced the latter's behaviour. Key to the book, for example, is the simple fact that, in practice, arms were repeatedly carried within the pomerium (12). In many ways ‘crossing the pomerium’ serves here as a specific lens through which to expose more fundamental thinking on the civic world in Rome, the military sphere beyond it, and the relationship between the two.

The first chapter begins with Pliny's reference to an unusual statue of Julius Caesar dressed in a cuirass (loricatus; HN 34.18), which, via a discussion of the purported novelty of such an image, allows for its specific circumstances to be pinned down – late 48 bce, when the civil war was technically finished, but its consequences far from realized (14–25). The unusual depiction thus becomes not just a statement but a reminder – or even a warning – of Caesar's capacity, as dictator, to command both domi et militia, and thus to wield imperium militia within the pomerium. That in turn prompts a discussion of the famed Prima Porta statue of Augustus, which Koortbojian argues is similarly unusual, and similarly significant: a symbol, in 19 bce, of his recusatio, since he did not need triumphal status, and could – since 23 bce, but now with new legal foundation – carry his imperium across the pomerium (25–40). In many ways it serves as a symbol, successively, of the crumbling of the traditional significance of the pomerium, the new meaning of imperium, and thus the transition from republic to empire.

The second chapter turns to Octavian's status in 43 bce, and in particular his imperium auspiciumque. Here a wide survey of the diverse elements involved in the Republican appointment of senior magistrates serves as a backdrop to explain each aspect of Octavian's initial entrance to Roman politics (46–77). Koortbojian concludes that Octavian's appointment to ‘a command with independent imperium auspiciumque was hardly unusual in Republican military history’ (55), that ‘auspices of departure’ did not exist as a distinct ritual institution as scholars have always assumed (66–71), and that Octavian's gilded equestrian statue (mentioned by Velleius Paterculus 2.61.3) and related coin types were a symbol that he held the auspices both domi and militiae (71–7).

The third chapter uses a wide range of reliefs depicting imperial sacrifice to problematize the binary distinction between the ritus Romanus and the ritus Graecus, where the choice was dictated by the god worshipped. Koortbojian adds to the discussion a distinctive ritus militaris (78–90), characterized not by the nature of the god, but by the sphere in which the rite was carried out. Moreover, taking as a prompt the thorny issue of Tiberius’ apparently military sacrifice within the pomerium depicted on the Boscoreale Cup, Koortbojian suggests that physical geography was less important than the legal and religious sphere to which an activity related (90–101). He explains this important crux as follows:

despite the long-standing tradition of scholarship that regards domi and militia as mutually defining conceptions, these were neither primarily nor fundamentally a matter of the realities of geography. The ideology that divorced res civiles from res militares depended on the establishment of legal and religious ‘fictions’ that the Romans were so often willing to employ. (101)

This chapter ends with a discussion of a number of anomalous examples, which leads to a wider discussion of the extent to which Romans were bound to such institutions, or, as Koortbojian nicely puts it, how normal, as opposed to normative, was the distinction between civil and military imagery (101–22).

The fourth chapter focuses on the Arch of Constantine, and its unusually martial depiction of its eponymous emperor, again loricatus, before his senators. Koortbojian argues – once more via wide comparison – that the imagery on the arch, first, must have had the emperor's implicit or explicit approval (125–34); second, flaunts its triumphal nature despite the absence of an actual triumph (134–40); and third, conveys a clear message that the new (usurping) emperor would have no scruples, if pushed, about again crossing the pomerium – alongside which the arch stood – with his troops to deal with any challenge to his power.

This is not the easiest of books to read, and certainly not one for the beginner. But scholars, whether budding or realized, will find much here to reward their efforts. Methodologically, for a start, Koortbojian, an archaeologist and art historian, demonstrates by painstaking but always logical progression how detailed contextual analysis of an individual statue, monument, or coin can lead to important changes in our big-picture understanding of the Roman world. Second, the particular conclusions on the four specific topics here treated will each be important to their respective experts – those about Augustus’ or Constantine's personae, for example, will feed the (endless) book-length studies of those bookmark emperors. Third, the overall takeaway of Koortbojian's study, though neither simple nor easily summarized, fits with wider current thinking on, for example, Roman law, namely that such institutions served less as immutable principles and more as flexible concepts that could be mobilized by those with the vision and capital so to do.

The same conclusion is drawn by Institutions and Ideology in Republican Rome, an edited collection which approaches Republican institutions from a different direction.⁴ This volume, one of the final outputs of the 2012–17 ERC-funded project ‘The Fragments of the Republican Roman Orators’, gathers essays from sixteen contributors (the three editors offer a co-written ‘Introduction’ [1–11] rather than individual essays) which seek to explore the diverse and complicated interactions between – you guessed it – institutions and ideology in the Late Republic specifically. Both terms are, of course, loaded, particularly for the study of the Republic, and the editors offer careful clarification of both. By institutions they mean ‘the rules and organisational structures by which political decisions were reached and implemented’ (1), and gloss this as incorporating

assemblies of citizens, the magistrates who could summon them, their procedural rules and the decisions that they could legitimately reach; the Senate, its members, its rules of debates and the status of its decisions; law, its creation, administration and implementation; religious authority and decision-making; and executive power, including the process of elections and military commands. (1)

Ideology is even more controversial. The editors mean here ‘political belief’ (1), and part of their goal in this collection is to insist that this did motivate political actors despite the now broadly recognized absence of ‘party politics’ in this period. Late Republican politics was not just about money, power, and connection; some people ‘shared judgements about the world as it was and as it should be and acted with the aim of achieving or preventing social and political change’ (3). The contention worked out in the contributions here is that these concrete institutions and genuine beliefs were the two drivers of Late Republican politics, and that the interplay between them was not always predictable, and was thus a key – and neglected – way of explaining the events and behaviours of this period.

The sixteen essays are in four sections, ‘Modes of Political Communication’ (Alexander Yakobson, 15–34; Claudia Tiersch, 35–68; Cristina Rosillo-López, 69–87; and Anna Clark, 88–104), ‘Political Alliances’ (Francisco Pina Polo, 107–27; Federico Santangelo, 128–46; Cas Valachova, 147–64; and Kit Morrell, 165–80), ‘Institutions in Theory and Practice’ (Lindsay Driediger-Murphy, 183–202; Guido Clemente, 203–21; Ayelet Haimson Lushkow, 222–35; Roman Frolov, 236–51; and Harriet Flower, 252–64), and ‘Memory and Reputation’ (Evan Jewell, 267–82; Alexandra Eckert, 283–98; and Martin Stone, 299–313). Two key conclusions can be drawn from the papers as a whole. The first parallels that of Koortbojian: namely that Rome's institutions, though couched in the language of constancy, were in fact both evolving and malleable. The second is that, when institution and ideology mixed, the latter gave individual oratory the capacity to change the former: ‘In this respect, as in others, Roman politics was balanced between complex rules that negotiated gradations of power and status and potency of public performance and audience consent’, and again, ‘some of the most striking and memorable political occasions happened precisely when those involved resisted the existing conventions governing performance and, through their actions and the subsequent assent of their audience, created new ones’ (11).

Many of this volume's essays thus concern – unsurprisingly – oratory. That, and the interest in its final section in legacy, takes us nicely onto historiography, our second focus in this review. Here we begin with the latest volume in the Clarendon Ancient History Series, Christopher Mallan's translation of and commentary on Books 57 and 58 of Cassius Dio's Roman History.⁵ These books, which span the reign of Tiberius, are of obvious importance for understanding Dio (since the latter dedicates a disproportionate amount of space to this period; discussed here at 24–7), this emperor, and the long political transition from ‘republic’ to ‘empire’. Yet Mallan here offers the first detailed commentary in English (as well as the first English translation since that of Earnest Cary in the Loeb Classical Library). His goal is to offer both a historical and a literary commentary: that is, to discuss what a given passage reveals about both Tiberius’ reign and Dio's authorial project.

A long introduction is split into in three unequal sections, covering by turns Dio himself (1–5), his historical practice (5–34) – including his sources, his compositional method, and his approach to shaping his material – and the text's transmission history (35–42). The first can offer little new, unsurprisingly, and is thus appropriately brief, though Mallan's attempt to include the women of Dio's family is as commendable as it is inevitably frustrated. The second section, the longest, offers a careful consideration of long-masticated fodder. The bulk concerns the question of Dio's sources, including literary texts, annals, sayings, acta senatus, ‘state records’, and oral material. Though recognizing the difficulty of the enterprise, Mallan insists on its importance, and offers a detailed and judicious account of previous overly ambitious attempts to identify and schematize such sources, noting which are flights of fancy and which have more merit. Among the former are most attempts to identify particular authors as key influences. Characteristic, for example, is Mallan's considered judgement that we need not suppose Dio's use of Suetonius, since an interest in the biographical and Suetonius’ fame should not outweigh the lack of any concrete signs of dependence (7–9). One interesting suggestion is Dio's possible use of Tiberius Claudius Balbillus as a source for material on divination and astrology (20–1). In general, however, Dio emerges as an author who mobilized a wide array of material – in both Greek and Latin (10–12) – but who was not overly in the thrall of any particular predecessor. The book as a whole repeatedly reveals its origins as a thesis under the supervision of Christopher Pelling, but is not hidebound to Pelling's interpretations; on the question of Dio's method, for example, it sides not with Pelling's model (whereby a control text guided Dio's writing) but instead with that of John Rich (which suggested that the notes resulting from Dio's extended research were the key basis, together with his sources, for his later period of composition [27–8]). And, despite Mallan's restrained approach, a clear picture of Dio and his interests emerge – senatorial, of course, but also a particular concern with honours, power, and patronage, and their respective effects (31).

The third section, however, is where Mallan's project really stands out. He insists – admirably, and I think quite correctly – that the Byzantine authors whose later excerpts and epitomes help fill the extensive lacunae in Dio's text be treated in their own right. So Mallan – who has already made several contributions in this arena – discusses the Excerpta Constantiniana, Xiphilinus’ Epitome, and John Zonaras’ Epitome of Histories.⁶ This insistence shapes the very form of the translation and commentary. In contrast to his predecessors, Mallan does not merge and harmonize these later witnesses to produce an approximation of Dio's lost original, a practice which, as he says, ‘gives a false impression of the completeness of Dio's narrative and…ignores the reality that Xiphilinus and Zonaras were authors in their own right, and that their epitomes were separate and distinct literary creations’ (41). Instead, he simply includes, translates, and comments on the relevant sections of these later texts, clearly marked as such.

Mallan clearly feels the need to defend, in his Preface, his belief that commentaries remain ‘fundamentally useful’ books that ‘provide a way to access the mind of an ancient writer’ (v). In his clear, readable translation – self-deprecatingly described as ‘workmanlike’ (41) – and the careful, informative commentary, equally insightful on matters historical and historiographical, that is exactly what he has produced. But it has the additional bonus that, because of his commitment to taking seriously the manuscript tradition and thus Dio's later epitomisors, not just one but multiple minds are here laid bare.

Mallan's efforts are one strand, as he acknowledges, of the prospering international Cassius Dio Network led by Jesper Madsen, Carsten Lange, Josiah Osgood, and Adam Kemezis (vii). One of the other initiatives established by the first two of these is Brill's ‘Historiography of Rome and Its Empire’ series (Osgood and Kemezis also sit on its editorial board), of which our next book, Aske Damtoft Poulsen and Arne Jönsson's Usages of the Past in Roman Historiography, is the latest volume.⁷ Perhaps unsurprisingly, five of the nine volumes so far are on Dio (as is the forthcoming tenth), but this ninth is in the minority in focusing on Late Republican and Early Imperial material. This collection aims, as did the 2018 conference on which it is based,

to facilitate debate not only about the literary-rhetorical nature of historiography, i.e. how past events were (consciously or unconsciously) placed and given meaning, but also about conceptualisations of historical change during transformative periods of Roman history, i.e. how portrayals of the past might reveal unstated assumptions about the passing of time and indicate expectations of the future. (vii)

The eleven essays here collected are thus interested (for the most part – see further below) in the diverse ways in which Roman texts about the past deliberately use pre-existing writings about the past for their own purposes – ‘aesthetic, personal, epistemological, and ideological’ (7). They are split into three sections, ‘Coming to Terms with the Principate’ (Roberto Cristofoli, 25–39; Rachel Lilley Love, 40–68; and Kai Ruffing, 69–88), ‘Intertextuality and Intratextuality’ (Christopher Krebs, 91–114; Ulrike Roth, 115–45; Christina Kraus – whose 2014 essay inspired the conference on which the volume is based – 146–68;⁸ and Aske Damtoft Poulsen, 169–93), and ‘The Frontiers of Historiography’ (Rhiannon Ash, 197–224; Johan Vekselius, 225–61; Kyle Khellaf, 262–97; and Anne-Marie Leander Touati, 298–325).

There is much to be gained here both from individual essays and from the collective they make up. Particularly admirable is the editors’ effort in their jointly authored introduction (1–22) to tease out overall conclusions (so often an exercise paid only lip service). They offer a fourfold typology for usage of the past: first, ‘a real-life historical person may model behaviour on that of a predecessor’ (8); second, ‘an historian may provide an account of events in which he was himself involved’ (10); third, ‘an historian may engage with earlier texts (or earlier parts of the same text) or objects either to offer a new interpretation of the events presented therein/on…or to portray other events through their lens’ (10); and fourth, ‘an historian may re-interpret a course of events by employing a characteristic style or mode of writing’ (11). This is an interesting and useful model for thinking about historiography, if only as a starting gambit to be further nuanced.

Nevertheless, I think that one might fairly question the overall coherence of this collection. At root, given the nature of the genre, there is little about historiography that does not qualify as in some sense ‘usage of the past’; as the editors themselves say in their introduction, ‘accounts of the past are always also usages of the past’ (3). And while certain of the essays – those of Roth, for example, or Khellaf – explore the wider theoretical or methodological consequences of their case studies, one feels that others could have fitted into any generic work on historiography. Moreover, this is a rare example where the printed volume is more disparate than the conference on which it is based, since, whereas the latter was focused on historiography, the former includes, for example, Leander Touati's ‘Epilogue’, which ‘sets out to investigate what the material record might reveal about the perception and usage of history in Roman Pompeii’ (298). I am all for recognizing the blurred nature of genres in antiquity. But this does rather beg the question why the volume's title and raison d’être are so apparently focused on the textual form (an issue, in fairness, acknowledged at 2, n. 1).

From the past to the future. Our penultimate volume, Jonathan Price and Katell Berthelot's The Future of Rome, collects thirteen essays discussing how the denizens of the empire imagined what would become of the vast entity in which they lived.⁹ This is a topic perfectly suited for such a collective approach, and the result does not disappoint. The editors are explicitly interested not in the teleology with which historians of the ilk discussed above described ‘already experienced historical time’, but rather how other ‘subjects and writers conceived of the not-yet-experienced future of the Roman Empire’ (2). So, though in fact historiography makes an appearance via Polybius, Dionysius, and Appian (in Jonathan Price's chapter, 85–112) and Josephus (in Samuele Rocca's and Jonathan Davies’ chapters, 130–54 and 155–68 respectively), we are treated here to discussions of a theme that exercises authors writing in a remarkable range of genres: Cicero's philosophical treatises (in Carlos Lévy's chapter, 17–31), Virgil and Ovid's poetry (in Brian Breed's and Ayelet Haimson Lushkov's chapters, 32–46 and 47–63 respectively), the Arval Acta (in Greg Woolf's chapter, 64–84), Philo's assorted writings (in Katell Berthelot's chapter, 112–29), rabbinic and sectarian commentary (in Vered Noam's chapter, 169–88), the Sibylline Oracles (in Eric Gruen's chapter, 189–205), New Testament apocalyptic (in Peter Oakes's chapter, 206–26), Constantine's imperial oratory (in Marko Marinčič's chapter, 227–44), and the assorted Latin writings of late antiquity (in Hervé Inglebert's chapter, 245–58).

This range of materials leads the editors to their primary, and entirely justified, conclusion, namely that ‘practically no one living under Rome's rule, including the Romans themselves, did not think about the question in one form of another’ (1). But in this we see also a potential barrier to further insight, created by the conceptual division of the papers into the four categories of the volume's title: ‘Romans’, ‘Greeks’, ‘Jews’, and ‘Christians’. On the one hand, of course, the authors here treated lend themselves to such easy categorization. But I also could not help but feel that it ended up rather hindering cross-fertilization. It is by now well established in anthropology, and widely acknowledged in Classics, that identity is not homogenous: people, whether individuals or groups, are not either one thing or another. Thinking of an author as first and foremost a Roman, Greek, Jew, or Christian implies that their approach to any topic – in this case the future of Rome – was determined by that identity. And that in turn leads to generalizations about how Romans, Greeks, Jews, and Christians thought. At the simplest level, it is not universally true, for example, that ‘Oppressed people fantasize the destruction of their oppressor’ (14); the same kind of assumption, reversed, informs the reference to ‘the kind of devotion or loyalty to the central power that a local powerful figure would wish to demonstrate’ (9).

What is most interesting about these essays, to my mind, is where they demonstrate thinking that blurs these four categories. Marinčič's essay, for example, talks of how Christians could speak not of Rome's destruction but of its eternity after Constantine's conversion and accession, a rhetorical move that echoed that of earlier Roman Imperial authors. But Constantine's conversion was not the key marker here; what is so interesting about ‘Christian’ literature is precisely that from its infancy it demonstrated a whole range of attitudes – often even within the same text – towards the Roman state. In that light, it is interesting how, for example, Greg Woolf's argument on the Arval Acta – that their ritualistic approach to record-keeping was designed to reduce and even eradicate distinctions between past, present, and future (77–82), but that this co-existed with an acute anxiety about the fragility of any given situation (82–4) – parallels almost exactly a long-standing observation made of the first work of Christian historiography, Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History (and, indeed, of earlier Greek historiography too).¹⁰ To my mind then, the most intriguing contribution is that of Eric Gruen, whose analysis of the Fourth and Fifth Sibylline Oracles exposes, not, he argues, a Jewish vision of Rome's destruction but a literary accumulation of such visions from a whole range of stakeholders.

Rome's imagined destruction takes us to our final volume, Urban Disasters and the Roman Imagination.¹¹ Contributing to a budding focus on disaster in antique studies, the editors Virginia Closs and Elizabeth Keitel's scope combines a simultaneously wide range of cataclysms – fire, flood, earthquake, eruption, sack, and, of course, plague – with a narrow focus – the Roman city. The volume contains ten essays in three sections, ‘Literary Elaborations of the Urbs Capta Motif’ (Christina Kraus [making her second appearance in this review essay], 17–32; Timothy Joseph, 33–48; and Jacques A. Bromberg, 49–69), ‘The Causes of Urban Disasters’ (Isabel Köster, 73–92; Jessica Clark, 93–114; Jason Nethercut, 115–30; and Andreas Zanker, 131–51), and ‘Commemoration of Disasters’ (Virginia Closs, 155–80; Honora Howell Chapman, 181–200; and Joseph Farrell, 201–33). Despite the obvious difference that most of these essays are ostensibly interested in not future but past or present disaster, there are in fact numerous points of intriguing connection with The Future of Rome. The nexus between realia and Roman literary memory means that the fate of Rome often proves to be just beneath the surface of many ancient discussions of more immediate misfortunes. So, for example, the way that the mythical sack of Troy was repeatedly superimposed over contemporary events meant, inevitably, that such discussions and descriptions constantly and somewhat inevitably prompted musings on the ultimate existential threat to the empire's capital – one reason, of course, for the ubiquity of Rome's future in literature that Price and Berthelot observed. In this sense, it is fitting that this volume ends with Joseph Farrell's essay considering how the idea of ‘the sack of Rome’ has itself constantly evolved, which incorporates a thoughtful and nuanced reflection on the relevance of historical comparison in the modern world. Each putative Roman disaster – whether in 390 bce, 410 ce, 1204, 1453, 1527, 1849, 1870, 1922, or 2015; whether suffered at the hands of a hoard of Gallic warriors or a fourteen-year-old Hungarian chess prodigy – adds to and edits what is at root an imaginative trope (201–2), a palimpsest that carries an idea of recovery, regrowth, or regeneration. Ironically, then, the idea of the sack of Rome itself bears much responsibility for ensuring that Rome remains – thus far, at least – eternal.