Review by Choice Review
The Augustan Age (44 BCE-14 CE) is a period of cardinal importance in Roman history; the classic work on this period is Ronald Syme's masterpiece, The Roman Revolution (Oxford, 1939). This collection of essays was intended to honor Syme and to bring together examples of the latest thinking on the period's developments--political, literary, artistic, and religious. Unlike Raaflaub's earlier collection of essays, Social Struggles in Archaic Rome (CH, Sep'87), this volume is very uneven. In terms of scholarship, there are three short, brilliant papers (by Linderski, Luce, and Bowersock), six longer, interesting discussions, and ten papers that are wrong-headed, or pedestrian, or both. The contributions also range in accessibility from pieces a lower-division undergraduate would find easy to comprehend to some that are impenetrable without an all-out effort. The illustrations and indexes are excellent, and each paper has its own bibliography. -M. G. Morgan, University of Texas at Austin
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review