This book is a much-awaited study in the field of papyrology and onomastics that also contributes more broadly to ongoing questions about the long-term cultural and social history of Roman Egypt in relationship with political changes as well as the methodology for handling large data-sets in ancient history. Onomastics posits that the study of names in very large numbers and over a long period allows us to detect changes in society and the construction of individual or collective identities. Yanne Broux chose a promising angle by investigating the very marked peak in the use of double names in Egypt under Roman rule from 30 b.c. to a.d. 400, over 6 per cent in the third century in contrast to c. 1 per cent at the beginning of the period. A companion study on Hellenistic Egypt (323–30 b.c.) has been published by S. Coussement: ‘Because I am Greek’: Polyonymy as an Expression of Ethnicity in Ptolemaic Egypt (2016). B. argues that the local élite of the Egyptian countryside extensively used double names connected with the formula ὁ καί (‘also known as’), most often two Greek names, to mark their status within the new Roman political and social landscape and that they chose this strategy ‘because it corresponded to different aspects of the cultural identity of the gymnasial order’ (270). She demonstrates that onomastic studies can offer a deeper understanding of the relationship between local élites and imperial powers, double names in Roman Egypt being ‘an excellent example of reciprocity between bottom-up and top-down processes’ (277).

This is the first time in ancient Mediterranean onomastics that such a large data-set has been used — more than 220,000 individuals (108). B., therefore, devotes a large section of her introduction to explaining the tools developed to collect the data and the technical difficulties and solutions in identifying names. In total, over 8,000 double names — 2.7 per cent of all attested names (17) — were extracted from two databases: first, the Duke Data Bank of Documentary Papyri (DDBDP), which contains all published non-literary papyri in Greek and Latin; second, the Trismegistos platform, designed by Mark Depauw and his research team at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, to which B. belonged, and whose texts database has collected more than 130,000 non-literary and literary texts written between 800 b.c. and a.d. 800 in Greek and other languages.

Chs 1 and 2 set the stage for assessing the impact of Roman rule on society with an overview of the legal and fiscal categories used in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt and stress how identification methods intersect with onomastics and status. Chs 3 to 5 each characterize one aspect of the double names: first, the sources (mainly Greek but also Latin and Egyptian) and their popularity across time, space, age, gender and status; second, the formulas to introduce them; and third, the names themselves, while the statistics from each chapter are illustrated in well-designed graphics. In ch. 6, B. turns to a qualitative analysis of six well-documented family archives (with private and official documents) spread across three Egyptian nomes (districts) between the first and third century a.d. Finally she analyses, in ch. 7, the naming patterns detected through big data against the archival material and situates her argument about local élite strategies within the scholarship on Romanization.

This book contributes greatly to a better understanding of the social strategies of certain local groups in the Roman provinces and is an indispensable addition to various articles published in recent decades on two categories of Aegyptii who paid a reduced poll-tax, namely, the metropolites and the gymnasial order, and whose membership became hereditarily ‘closed’ after the 60s a.d. Since they did not form an élite, but rather a distinct social class as stressed by B., it may at first seem confusing to talk about ‘elite strategy’, yet it was ‘a minority within the entire population of Aegyptii, which does have an elitist ring to it’ (49–50). A section on theoretical approaches to the concept of élite (touched upon on 47–50), notably among the scholarship on the Roman Empire, and how terms such as regional, local, sub-élites can be defined meaningfully in relationship to one another, would have helped to map more clearly the ongoing provincial stratification and to justify why the gymnasial order seems to be presented as the local élite in later chapters.

Most importantly, B. confirms and refines earlier insights and presents new arguments with far-reaching consequences. First, she demonstrates the clear difference in usage between ὁ καί employed for official double names given at birth and (ἐπι)καλούμενος (‘called (by surname)’ and similar expressions) used for bynames given later for distinguishing non-élite individuals in highly homonymic contexts. Secondly, she disproves the idea that the high numbers of double names among the two privileged orders of Aegyptii were due to the overwhelming data from the metropoleis. The archive of village-scribe Petaus makes clear that (ἐπι)καλούμενος formulas are almost the only ones to appear there. Thirdly, she convincingly advances the argument that the ὁ καί double names were mostly used by the gymnasial order, whose members formed the council and magistrates of the metropoleis and were a mark of status. The choice of the double names reflected an inclination for Greek culture, an emphasis on ancestry through homonymy, and a creative imitation of the Roman naming system, that was forbidden to non-citizens until the Constitutio Antoniniana (a.d. 212). B. thus brings several new pieces of evidence to reconstruct and distinguish the collective identities of the two fiscally privileged orders of the Roman Egyptian countryside.