This book is a valuable study of senior senators and high equestrians. Mennen's point of departure is the scholarly consensus that ‘events of the third century AD affected imperial appointment policies and social hierarchies and foreshadowed the reforms carried through by Diocletian’ (1). She seeks to study ‘the process by which appointments and hierarchies changed, and particularly its effects on power and status relations’ (ibid.). Ch. 2 concerns leading senators (49–81), with an accompanying prosopographical ‘excursus’ on eighteen prominent families (83–134); ch. 3 concerns senior equestrians (135–91); and ch. 4 contrasts senior military officers under Septimius Severus and Gallienus (193–246).
M.'s main interest in ch. 2 is to highlight continuity in the political rôle of senators. Her approach is to identify four high positions — the ordinary consulship, city prefecture, and proconsular governorships of Africa and Asia — and to trace eighteen gentes whose members were particularly prevalent in these offices. M. has a point, of course: these posts are very much where one would tend to expect continuity. For the present reviewer, however, what stands out is that these eighteen gentes did not maintain overall dominance even here: excluding emperors and their prospective heirs, M. calculates that they accounted for 34–39 per cent of ordinary consuls, as well as 25–27 per cent of city prefects and 17–20 per cent of proconsuls of Africa and Asia (table 2.1, p. 54). Hence, although certainly well represented, they remained very much part of a wider group. The prosopographical excursus reinforces this impression. M.'s dossier is interesting but not because it shows the continuity of a nucleus. On the contrary, eleven of these eighteen gentes (tables E.1, E.3, E.5–11, E.13–14) either disappeared or faded from prominence before a.d. 284, perhaps most notably in the 240s. Conversely, three other gentes appear to have risen to prominence within the period (tables E.2, E.12 and E.15 — the last gens slipping again soon after). We are looking, therefore, at a significant turnover, much of it probably natural. M. might be right to emphasize the continuing significance of the senate; but that continuity was largely corporate, not biological.
Ch. 3 surveys the increasing rôle of equestrians as provincial governors, military officers and imperial secretaries, followed by a ‘case study’ on the praetorian prefecture. M. is alert to the fact that equestrians were frequently appointed, nominally, as deputies for absent senatorial officials (138–41). Conversely, she perhaps understates the significance of the elevation of praetorian prefects to the senatorial rank of clarissimus and, under Severan emperors, the practice of treating ornamenta consularia as equivalent to an ordinary consulship (177–9). Ch. 4 charts a contrast in military commands under Septimius Severus and Gallienus, highlighting ‘two main developments’: ‘(1) the rise of equites as leading men in military crises, and (2) a widening gulf between military power and senatorial status’ (246). Both points have long been received wisdom but M. provides useful detail.
Two reservations about structure arise and a third about the theme of power and status. First, the book is a little slow to get going: both the introduction and ch. 1 cover territory which is likely to be largely familiar to most readers, yet neither says much about M.'s arguments, which receive by far their clearest statement only in her ‘Conclusion’ (247–54). Secondly, the layering of concluding observations within chapter sections plus conclusions to each full chapter and an overall conclusion to the book makes for repetition. Thirdly, M.'s development of the conceptual question of power and status is rudimentary. She summarizes Dahl's model of power and the subsequent work of Bachrach and Baratz, Lukes and Foucault. But while acknowledging the added sophistication brought by each new treatment, she expressly reverts to Dahl's ‘basic one-dimensional view’ (6) as her main point of reference (5–6, 46, 80, 188–9, 247). No one would doubt that the third-century evidence poses challenges for the elaboration of sophisticated conceptual models; but this use of political science is too limited for the historian's palate.
The present reviewer would close with one further observation. M.'s underlying concern is with ‘the transformation from the early to late Empire’ (1). This is a major historical problem and M.'s contribution deserves note. One leaves her book with the strong impression that — so far as senior civil and military service is concerned — the ‘late’ empire had already arrived in the 260s. Yet this is not really because of the ebb and flow of office-holding between senators and equestrians: matters would shift again in the fourth century with the senatorial ‘revival’ and the expansion of senatorial rank. Rather, what we are looking at are symptoms of a profound invasion of imperial government by provincial aristocracies. Senators and equestrians alike were increasingly recruited from the upper echelons of provincial aristocratic society. More widely, however, and no less decisively for the character of politics, society and economy, provincial aristocrats would also come to fill the ranks of the vast civilian bureaucracy that sets ‘late’ imperial government firmly apart from its ‘high’ forerunner.
