Ancient history often seems to lag behind other areas of history when it comes to adopting new methodological and theoretical approaches. This crop of books, however, does offer contributions in two notable and significant areas of current scholarship: first in the area of memory studies, and second representing what we might call the ‘cognitive turn’. In addition there is a robust defence of a structuralist-informed approach to Greco-Roman religion, as well, of course, as books representing the more traditional areas of ancient history such as epigraphy and biography.

I shall begin, however, with a work by a reliably innovative scholar whose work crosses the boundaries of literature and history, and indeed this book is offered as an approach to ‘classical literature as social history’.Footnote ¹ This history of the Roman audience seeks to puncture the idea that Roman literature was created for a small and elite coterie. The central argument is that it was, in fact, primarily intended for public performance before a large audience and that this, not the production of written copies, represented its primary form of ‘publication’. This is demonstrated in a chronological account covering a fairly longue durée, from the very beginnings of Latin literature up to the time of the Principate. Clearly the pace of the narrative cannot be even: after a slow start, once we get to the Late Republic there is a veritable explosion both of literature and accounts of context and reception to be considered and here the ancient texts are interspersed with the historical narrative of the period. Cicero is an important witness (both author and actor) here and Wiseman's readings enliven even the most familiar passages. For instance we revisit the famous letter from Cicero to Marcus Marius about Pompey's games (Fam. 7.1) and see how translations have consistently misrepresented the contrast that Cicero is making: not so much between the hordes watching shows at Rome and Marius ‘reading’ at home, because Marius is not reading: it is clear he is being read to by his slave lector, and hence constitutes an audience of one. Caesar's Gallic Wars come to new life too, as Wiseman plausibly suggests that they were first ‘published’ as yearly reports from the front, read aloud in the theatre. Both internal and external evidence are employed to show again and again that a wide range of poetic and prose texts were performed in the theatre before being ‘published’ in written version. We get writers who sought to chafe against this mode of publication, such as Manilius, who claimed ‘I shall compose my songs neither in the crowd nor for the crowd, but alone’ (164; Manilius 2.137), but one gets the impression that Manilius was swimming against the tide. Nonetheless, as Wiseman makes clear, such wishes for an elite audience would ultimately be fulfilled by generations of classical scholars, who have continued to assume ‘that sophisticated literature must be intended only for a cultured elite’ (167). He shows very nicely, across a long period, that this tenuously held view (the product, perhaps [though Wiseman does not explicitly say so], of the history of Classics as, all too often, a subject for a small elite) actually goes against the balance of the evidence of the texts themselves. This is a high-speed and spirited narrative, and the pace at which it moves does sometimes mean that Wiseman cannot do full justice to his texts or arguments, as with the rather brief discussion of Seneca's Octavia, with a lively attack on ‘the phantom genre of “recitation drama”’ (168). The final chapter deals with the second and third centuries, arguably giving this crucial formative period rather short shrift, seeing it merely as consolidation of a development that crystallized at the start of the first century ce. Overall, however, the work is a tour de force, and is often exhilarating in the lively slaughter of a number of sacred cows. A grand sweep of Roman history and texts is given but, as I have intimated above, there many places where one wishes that the author could slow and down and give more space to develop and demonstrate how his argument works. This is not helped by the decision to give non-numbered endnotes, which is rather frustrating for scholarly and student readers. Such a format also prevents a more up-front engagement with the scholars whose presumptions are overturned, as well as with those whose views are more complementary, and this is likewise a pity. Overall, as promised, this book does offer a social history of classical texts, but it does more: this history is also political in both the narrower and broader senses of the world. Wiseman is clearly continuing his long-standing project to bring the history of the Roman people (or People, in his coinage), not just that of the elites, to life. The argument against the restriction of Roman literature to a small ‘gentleman’ audience, and for its forging in a larger social context, is an important one, for both literary scholars and historians.

While Wiseman seeks to bring new life to Roman literary texts, Emily Hemelrijk wants us to look beyond the somewhat clichéd picture given by such texts to form a more rounded picture of Roman women.Footnote ² Here an impressive collection of some 1,400 inscriptions provide the basis for a study of the role of women in the civic life of the Roman West, from the late first century bce to the late third century ce. Through synchronic study, we meet a wide range of women (only forty per cent of whom definitely belong to the ‘elite’ classes, i.e. senatorial, equestrian, and decurion) involved in a wide range of roles and activities. We see these women as priestesses, as patrons and ‘mothers’ of cities and associations, as dedicators and dedicatees of honorary statues, as interacting and even serving in collegia, giving banquets, making distributions, and building and restoring buildings. While some activities (such as acting as city patrons) were limited to women of the highest rank and wealth, others (such as maintaining connections with collegia) were available to women of much more modest social standing and means. Hemelrijk convincingly argues that these women were motivated not just by the opportunity to advance the male members of the family but also by the opportunities to advance their own status and standing. The book is really exemplary in the carefulness and clarity of its methodology and as such does indeed provide an impressive and convincing corrective to more traditional, literary-based studies of Roman women. Hemelrijk's methodological acuity means her work provides a useful contribution to study too of civic history more generally, to the study of the epigraphic habit and indeed (though scare quotes still apply) to ‘Romanization’. The differences between the different parts of the West are never occluded, and the differences in chronology and geography are indeed important to the book. The notable differences here form the basis of the key argument that

All in all, this is a hugely valuable study that will be much used by scholars and research students in the years to come.

A key advantage of a careful and detailed study like Hemelrijk's study is that it can nuance long-held positions elsewhere. In her study of female priesthoods she notes that the number of opportunities for women in a range of civic cults, including even the imperial cult, distinctly problematize the ‘boundaries of…[the] validity’ of the influential civic model of Graeco-Roman religion (40). John Scheid's new book, translated from the French, is a passionate defence of the model of ‘polis religion’, as developed primarily out of a structuralist-functionalist approach, against more recent developments.Footnote ³ Scheid sees these developments as rearguard actions, representing a backwards step, returning to an anachronistic, Christianizing approach to Roman religion. However, it can be difficult to test the validity of this argument as its targets are often referred to only obliquely (and, unhelpfully, in endnotes). Some might well think that the work under attack (such as the work on ‘lived religion’ by Jörg Rüpke, among others) is rather misrepresented here. The aim and methods of this short essayistic book are such that it is not an obvious entry point for English-speaking readers wanting to glean something of the very important contribution to the study of Roman religion that Scheid has made.Footnote ⁴ However, those closely engaged in the study of Roman religion, and indeed the methodological and theoretical issues involved in the study of religion more broadly, will find it very interesting indeed.

Clifford Ando's new book, based on lectures delivered in Toronto in 2012, certainly does not shy away from approaches that are far from being the bread and butter of the average ancient historian.Footnote ⁵ In the introduction he declares ‘Above all, I am interested in patterns of metaphor, metonymy, analogy, and ideation – those features of language that serve in particular traditions within cognitive linguistics to map fundamental structures of thought, specific to particularized linguistic and discursive systems’ (3). As might be expected from this, what follows is not an easy read for the less linguistically inclined historian. Over three substantive chapters entitled ‘Belonging’, ‘Cognition’, and ‘The Ontology of the Social’, through readings and expansion of a range of passages, most notably from Cicero, Livy, and the jurists, Ando seeks to show the key relationship between empire and linguistic structures. His aim is to demonstrate how new forms of language, especially metaphor, were required to deal with new situations arising from the political realities of empire: ‘Cognition was thus a precondition of empire as practice, and the extraordinary figuration of classical Latin was its product’ (97). Ando's study follows in the footprints of other recent works on the interrelation between language and empire at Rome,Footnote ⁶ offering something distinctive again, not least with its concentration on legal thought in particular, and this is clearly a growing field.

Our next book (or rather pair of books) takes us from broad notions of ‘cognition’ to the fascinating and surprising area of ‘the neuroscience of memory’. An interest in social, collective, and/or cultural memory, as laid out in the important work of Maurice Halbwachs, Pierre Nora, and Jan Assman in particular, has been notable of late in the work of scholars of ancient Rome. The two books under review here constitute the final parts of a trilogy, the fruit of Karl Galinsky's massive Memoria Romana project.Footnote ⁷ Both are edited collections, albeit with slightly different areas of interest, but with understandably similar introductions. The first volume, co-edited with Kenneth Lapatin, a classical archaeologist and curator at the Getty in Los Angeles (where the conference from which most of the papers hail was held), aims ‘to examine the varied impact of Rome's empire on cultural memories in the East and West, especially in the form of material culture’ (xi).Footnote ⁸ Galinsky kicks off by describing the Roman Empire as a ‘memoryscape’ (1) made up of a plurality of peoples and cultures. A number of the chapters focus on Roman Greece, for which such writers as Pausanius and Philostratus make natural witnesses (as in two reliably interesting chapters by Tim Whitmarsh and Jas’ Elsner). Others focus on well-known sites in Rome. But we are also taken to Anatolia, southern Spain, and even Roman Britain. Several papers consider the particular developments of memories in the Late Roman Empire. Greg Woolf's chapter offers a suggestive and stimulating approach to a well-known ‘site of memory’, the Forum of Augustus. Woolf begins with Paul Zanker's influential interpretation of the site, which imagined a visit as a totalizing experience. Woolf is understandably more sceptical and, while he considers how the ancient historiographical accounts present Augustus as announcing ‘a script for experiencing his forum’ (214), he makes it clear that we cannot expect such a script to followed in any simple fashion. We can see the Forum of Augustus as ‘a memory theatre’ but we must accept that memories are far from hegemonic: ‘Shared memories are as essential for argument as for consensus, and shared symbols are often the focus of the fiercest struggles’ (222).

The second book again considers some key sites in Rome and elsewhere in the empire but has a particular focus on early Christianity, looking at memories associated with both people and places, including Jerusalem as well as Rome.Footnote ⁹ The chapters in this volume in particular are somewhat variable in terms of how much substantive material they contain, alongside the discussion of memory-related issues. Those by Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp and Elke Stein-Hölkeskamp focus closely and productively on issues of ‘memory management’ in the Late Republic and would probably be of interest to historians with or without a particular interest in the field of collective memory, while the literary discussions of Alain Gowing and Jörg Rüpke on Tacitus and Valerius Maximus respectively are likewise solid. Milton Moreland's paper on early traditions about St. Peter in Rome, however, would disappoint anyone looking for any substantial discussion of the long-standing problem of the two commemorative sites. The most striking chapter is not written by a historian at all, but rather by neuroscientists, the leading scholar Onur Güntürkün and colleagues, and does an admirably clear job of explaining the neuroscience of memory to an audience of amateurs, and their claim that the science of human memory ‘intrinsically matters to the science of history’ (369) is persuasive. The scientific discussion of different types of memory and how they function shows clear analogies with cultural and collective memories. I was fascinated to read that one can't just simply ‘retrieve’ memories, as new layers are always accruing: ‘every time we (try to) retrieve a piece of information it is re-formed and reactivated, putting it at risk of being influenced, distorted, or even changed by our current state, opinions, and knowledge’ (389). This chapter is likely to constitute for many the most interesting and valuable one of all, and certainly raises pause for thought for the historian (and the individual) when it concludes: ‘Our subjective past is a fragile neuronal construction, ever-changing when being used’ (389).

In another image of layered memories, David Potter writes that the life of Theodora, ‘actress, empress, saint’, is ‘a palimpsest’.Footnote ¹⁰ The biography of the Byzantine empress has, indeed, many complex and fascinating layers. To too many generations it has been Procopius’ vituperative image that has held sway. Potter, like all sensible recent commentators, is well aware that the main point of the ceaseless attack on Theodora in the Secret History is in fact to get at imperial men – Justinian and Belisarius – according to the well-trod ancient historiographical traditions whereby powerful men were attacked through their women. Procopius, as Potter puts it, was ‘a bit hung up on sex’ (26), and again, no reader of ancient historiography will be surprised by how many of the negative stories involving an imperial woman include sex (Chapter Two is aptly entitled ‘Telling Nasty Stories’). However, while Procopius is a compelling read, different versions of Theodora can be found in a number of very different authors writing in the different (and opposed) Christian traditions of the period. Moreover, Potter, like other authors in the new ‘Women in Antiquity’ series, takes the opportunity to look at a broader range of types of source, not least in order to use the ‘life’ in question to bring the surrounding historical context into sharp relief. We get lively pictures of the circus factions and the tumultuous Nika Riots, of the terrible plague (maybe half the population of Constantinople died overall), and of the religious controversies of the period. Not all the best anecdotes relate to Theodora: there is the case of a troublesome sperm whale nicknamed Porphyrius, who wreaked havoc in the Bosphorus in the 540s. Equally rebarbative, perhaps, is the Christian celebrity Mare ‘the Solitary’, described by Potter as ‘a deeply subsocial individual’ (171), who dared to tell Theodora to go to hell. (One small caveat: the convoluted religious controversies of the period and the warring individuals involved in them are dealt with in fair detail but are rather hard to follow for the non-specialist.) The picture of Theodora as a social reformer is not new to Potter but the case is well made, and the picture of the age of Justinian and Theodora is very well painted indeed. The reader is likely to agree with the author that Theodora, who grew up among theatrical performers, stole the heart of Justinian, and turned the tide on the Nika Riots, was indeed ‘the most extraordinary’ woman of her age (202). The subjective, constructed ‘memories’ of Theodora that succeeded after her death ranged from a saintly tradition in what became the Syrian Orthodox Church to the story told by a monk at Fleury that she was an Amazon who had been sold as a prostitute. The real Theodora, Potter rightly says, defies stereotype, but such ‘memories’ are what historians deal in daily.