Augustus and the Destruction of History is a provocative title, one that conjures the violence that attended Octavian's rise to power and the obsessive efforts of the Augustan period to rewrite and reorient Rome's history around the princeps. As the editors clarify: ‘in its most pregnant sense, the phrase refers to the apparent elimination of contingency from the historical process in the service of power — the transformation of historical time, in other words, from a realm of kaleidoscopic unpredictability with ever-shifting re-configurations, in which, in principle, (almost) anything is possible and nothing is (entirely) certain, into a realm of necessity that manifests the unfolding of an at least partially predetermined script, which includes the imaginary possibility of history coming to an end altogether’ (3).

In other words, the volume tackles narratives about the inevitability of the Augustan period and the rise of the principate, arguing that we have been too quick to buy into Augustan propaganda by seeing the Augustan age as being an internally coherent stretch of time marked especially by key events of world-historical significance. The volume's standouts are the editors’ introduction and the essays by Kathryn Welch, Wolfgang Havener, Josiah Osgood and Amy Russell. The introduction in particular should be mandatory reading for graduate students as a clear and succinct primer on Roman memory practices and the evolving modes of historiography in the republican period.

In the first chapter proper, Louise Hodgson challenges our use of the modern catchphrase libera res publica to describe the Roman Republic by noting that, even to the ancients, the res publica never truly enjoyed libertas; although Caesar's assassins aspired to a libera res publica, it was never meant to be, and while ‘Augustus’ res publica was not libera, … it looked libera enough to pass’ (58). Following Hodgson's opening gambit, Welch also considers ‘what might have been’ by showing how Antonius’ role as avenger of Caesar has (almost) been written out of history. But literature is not the only place where Antonius’ history has been revised; we might consider as a complement to Welch's argument the tendency to misattribute Octavian's rostral column to his victory over Antonius at Actium instead of his victory over Sextus Pompey at Naulochus, and therefore a tendency to write Antonius into history where he does not belong (for which see T. Biggs in M. Loar et al. (eds), Rome, Empire of Plunder (2017), 47–68).

The other three standout chapters do look to Rome's monumental landscape as a site for memory management, beginning with the contribution by Havener, who focuses on Augustus’ place in Rome's triumphal history. Havener convincingly proposes that Augustus should not be viewed as bringing the history of the Roman triumph to an end so much as establishing himself as the pinnacle of that triumphal history and thereby enacting ‘the “memorial dispossession” of the senatorial elite’ (130). Similar themes underpin the next two papers, which are paired under the heading ‘The Histories of Empowered Subalterns’. First, Osgood's jaunt through what he aptly labels modes of ‘parading genealogy’ (139) manages to pull off the impossible: it makes prosopography seem fun. More than that, it knits together some of the volume's common threads, showing in particular how both esteemed republican families and novi homines negotiated their place in Augustus’ Rome by obsessively displaying and in some cases outright fabricating family history. Russell, too, argues that genealogy and family history underlie the Senate's efforts to ‘monumentalise the past’ (157) through their erection of the fasti consulares on the Parthian arch: by attaching these fasti to a monument that celebrates (but was not built by) Augustus, the Senate affirms that their history and the memory of Rome's republican past are central to the Augustan present (and future) and cannot be destroyed. Both Osgood and Russell therefore pick up nicely on Havener's conclusion that the end of ‘triumphalist history’ ‘encouraged members of the senatorial elite to find new forms for achieving and advertising … glory’ (131).

Among the remaining contributions, Ulrich Gotter interrogates the meaning of imperium in the context of translatio imperii and Johannes Geisthardt and Ingo Gildenhard explore Catullus, Virgil and Tacitus’ engagements with the legend of Troy. Though of radically different lengths, both chapters speak persuasively to the place that ancient writers saw ‘imperial’ Rome occupying in the teleology of Roman (and world) history. By contrast, Benjamin Biesinger and Hannah Price both falter for tackling issues too large for the space they were allotted. In only sixteen pages, Biesinger touches on four different topics, including the concept of ‘rupture’, Sallust's historiographic method, the Forum Augustum and the ludi saeculares, any one of which would have been sufficient for a chapter. Though Price is given more than twice the space for her contribution, her tour through the various places and monuments of the Forum Romanum and their resonances in Augustan and post-Augustan literature likewise felt much too expansive and therefore unfocused for a single chapter. While both authors provide stimulating observations on their various topics, their analyses would have packed a bigger punch by incorporating less material.

Finally, Dunstan Lowe's chapter ‘Dust in the Wind: Late Republican History in the Aeneid’ is the only one where the argument falls flat, not least because its ultimate conclusion that we might ‘see Virgil more as logographer than ideologue’ (238) feels deeply unsatisfying in a volume whose subtitle invokes the ‘politics of the past’. Lowe opens by surveying recent scholarship that has elucidated allusions to Republican history in Virgil's Aeneid before proposing his own allusion to the Roman general Sertorius in the Hercules-Cacus episode of Book 8, arguing that Virgil ‘recall[s] an anecdote told in chapter seventeen of Plutarch's Life of Sertorius’ (233). The phrasing here is infelicitous: how can Virgil ‘recall’ a text written more than a century after his death? While it is possible that Plutarch is drawing on a source to which Virgil may have had access (such as Sallust, whose influence on Virgil Lowe mentions earlier) and that this is actually what Lowe intends, I would suggest that what Lowe has identified as a Virgilian allusion to Plutarch is far more likely a Plutarchian allusion to Virgil, especially because, as he demonstrates, Plutarch consistently highlights Sertorius’ Herculean associations elsewhere in his biography. An interesting argument, but one perhaps better suited for a different volume.

There is much to like in this collection, and it successfully accomplishes what is often so difficult with edited volumes: it manages to gather together a suite of essays that cohere and complement each other. What emerges is a clear sense of what ‘destroying history’ looked like in practice, whether that practitioner be princeps, SPQR or MPL.