While the chapters on Cicero and Seneca may be read productively by those interested in only either author, Wilcox's monograph works as a captivating whole, one which charts the transformation of the Roman letter as an instrument of social negotiation to one of philosophical self-reflection. W. construes the Roman letter as a kind of gift in accordance with definitions derived from contemporary anthropology; W. plots anthropological insights throughout the earlier chapters, mitigating procrustean application of theory to primary text. Key characteristics of the gift which are shared by letters are inherent mobility, the involvement of two or more participants, and the ability to yield ‘increase’ of the cohesion, complexity and value of the relationship of the participants (especially 10–12). Thus, by analysing the rhetoric of these epistolary gifts, W.'s monograph is also a study of amicitia, and how notions and practices of social reciprocity evolved from the Republic to the Principate. W. demonstrates expansive familiarity with the epistolary corpora of both authors as well as with the secondary literature in ample endnotes. An Index Locorum of all primary citations is also appreciated.

In Part I (‘Cicero: The Social Life of Letters’), the theory that gifts are systematically misrecognized in order to veil the obligation they confer on recipients is applied to Cicero's letters. As the letter-writer also denies his own self-interest in epistolary exchange, the result of misrecognition is euphemism, the topic of ch. 1 (‘Euphemism and its Limits’). Cicero stresses overlapping interests between himself and numerous addressees, at times to the point where the addressee, even Caesar (30–2), becomes his alter ego, and even extends language of kinship to non-relatives. In ch. 2 (‘Consolation and Competition’), W. explores eristic motivations underpinning letters of consolation, whether for bereavement or political loss. The striking lack of personal information about the deceased is symptomatic of these letters' primary aim to issue challenges to the addressee, and to endorse and stimulate Roman virtues of self-control.

In ch. 3 (‘Absence and Increase’), W. explores the key paradoxical characteristic of letters as a fiction of presence. Cicero calibrates his tone from positions of relative political advantage and disadvantage in letters to C. Trebonius and P. Lentulus; respective to each addressee, Cicero is the recipient and sender of books, and these additional literary gifts contribute to the consolation for his absence, foster the illusion of company, and create the need for further consolation for absence in the form of continued correspondence. In ch. 4 (‘Recommendation’), W. concisely schematizes the triangular relationship between the sender, recipient and person of interest, himself often the bearer, in letters of recommendation.

In Part 2 (‘Seneca: Commercium Epistularum: The Gift Refigured’), the analysis of gift exchange is subsumed to a study of amicitia more broadly. In ch. 5 (‘From Practice to Metaphor’), Seneca is shown to reject social euphemism as inherently duplicitous and corrupting, and also to recast conceptions of ownership and exchange towards philosophical ends, such as repaying one's correspondent not with social or financial favours but gifts (munuscula) of maxims from the commonwealth of wisdom. Also in this chapter W. begins exploring the relationship between Seneca and his ever present, always silent correspondent, Lucilius, and argues that Seneca's repeated claims of indebtedness to his addressee are a rhetorical stratagem to prompt any reader, Roman or modern, to begin assuming the rôle of Lucilius as a responsive, engaged reader. This discussion of the strangely lopsided relationship between Seneca and Lucilius forms the basis of ch. 6 (‘Rehabilitating Friendship’), in which W. resolves the paradox of how the sage can maintain friendship in relative seclusion from society.

Ch. 7 (‘Redefining Identity: Persons, Letters, Friends’) is perhaps the richest in insight and analysis. W. argues that an increase in the presence of exemplary models in the middle books (4–6) is a key stage in the process by which Seneca's epistles begin to coalesce as a continuous whole: insofar as the physical absence of these exemplars is analogous to the separation between correspondents, and insofar as distance should pose no barrier to learning from the words and experience of others, Seneca's epistolary corpus can become a sufficient proxy for Seneca the man, in contrast to Cicero's letters which present themselves as a palliative measure for his absence. Here W. precisely traces the rhetorical manoeuvres by which any reader of these letters is cast by Seneca into the rôle of Lucilius (especially 137–8). In ch. 8 (‘Consolation and Community’), Seneca is shown to analogize conventions of letter writing to the act of dying. Reading Seneca's letters is tantamount to enjoying and continuing to learn from the memory of a deceased friend, and a community of friendship can be maintained even when an individual friend has passed on. W. does not chart the rest of Seneca's extant epistolary corpus in depth, but ends her work with a neat reading of Letter 63, in which Seneca uses the homonymy of the recently deceased Annaeus Serenus to cast himself in the rôle of bereaved, consoler and departed, and write himself into epistolary memory. If the countergift Lucilius/we can offer Seneca is no less the act of reading, then W.'s monograph deserves similar repayment with frequent rereadings.