Catherine Steel's new history of the later Roman Republic frames the narrative between two key episodes of violence: the destruction in a single year of Carthage and Corinth, and the assassination of Julius Caesar. The introduction outlines the Roman political system, and the remainder of the book is then divided into three parts, each of which sketches out the events of the period concerned (146–91 b.c.; 91–70 b.c.; 70–44 b.c.) and discusses their implications in terms both of domestic politics and foreign affairs. This works very successfully and reinforces a central theme of the book: how events at Rome, in Italy and overseas were closely inter-related. Beginning the narrative in 146 b.c. allows the upheavals of the Gracchan era to be set in the context of Rome's difficult Spanish campaigns in the 140s and 130s; S. similarly highlights how, in Cicero's view, the outbreak of the Social War was to be linked with Livius Drusus' efforts to gain support for his plan to reform the courts by introducing a land bill (41).

S. is well known for her previous work on Cicero, and as the bust illustrated on the front cover suggests, he plays a central rôle here too: not only is Cicero a protagonist in many of the episodes discussed, but his philosophical and rhetorical dialogues, frequently set in the late second century b.c., are used by S. to cast light on the history of that era. One of the strengths of the book in fact is its concern to give proper emphasis to the years between the Gracchi and Sulla's dictatorship, and rectify the tendency to focus more on the post-Sullan period because of the greater wealth of surviving textual material, or (as S. puts it), ‘Cicero's logorrhea’ (121).

Throughout the book, S. combines astute analysis with neatly phrased formulations: the dictatorship of Sulla, ‘a baffling and unpredictable mix of the traditional and the unprecedented’ (107), is seen as fundamental to explaining the end of the Republic. Having seized power at Rome by force, Sulla sought to restore traditional political structures, a project which however turned out to be impractical since the identity of the Roman people had been transformed by the admission of the former allies to the citizenship, while the character of the Senate had also changed as a result of his own initiatives. Pompey's career, too, had a transformative rôle in relation to the Republic: S. highlights not only the exceptional nature of his multiple tenures of imperium, but also that service as one of his legates acted as a kind of alternative cursus honorum for the ambitious in the 60s and 50s. The consulship of 59 b.c., with its populist agenda, is seen as the tribunate the patrician Caesar was unable to hold (165).

In a successful career that lasted fifty years, S. notes, senators might stand for election to office only three times — helping to explain why politicians frequently followed a popularis strategy early in their career before taking a more traditionalist approach later on (47). Indeed S. has a very keen sense of the experience of members of the Senate as that body was transformed over time; she observes that at the time of Sulla's dictatorship there were hardly any surviving consulars, as a result of the Social War (which saw the deaths in action of Roman commanders on a scale only paralleled by the Hannibalic War), and the executions and proscriptions of the years which followed (129–30); the subsequent disappearance of the rôle of princeps senatus further deprived the Senate of leadership in time of crisis (250). Equally, S. has an eye for details casting light on the realities of life at the grassroots in Italy during this time: Horace's father may have been enslaved at Venusia during the Social War (93 n. 53); a passage of Suetonius' Life of Augustus (3.1) reveals that surviving combatants from Spartacus' revolt and the Catilinarian uprising were still causing problems in southern Italy as late as 60 b.c. (133).

S. draws on a substantial and up-to-date bibliography, not least the important essays she co-edited, with H. van der Blom, in Community and Communication: Oratory and Politics in Republican Rome (2013) (reviewed in JRS 105 (2015), 425–7). In a very few places I felt that a little more explanation might have helped S.'s readers: the account of M. Aemilius Lepidus ‘actively stamping his family's name on the forum’ (191) could have been made clearer by a more explicit reference to the restoration of the Basilica Aemilia, for example; and in general S. tends not to engage in detail with the implications of her narrative for the topography of the city of Rome. There are, however, some particularly interesting readings of key literary passages, such as Velleius' anecdote (Vell. Pat. 1.13) about L. Mummius' seizure of antique works of art from Corinth (62–4), or Catullus 11, illuminating contemporary perceptions of Rome's external conquests (211).

To sum up: S. has provided a lucid and persuasive narrative of the late Republic, complemented by a series of perceptive and thought-provoking analyses: there is a real wealth of ideas here. I will certainly be recommending the book to my students, and consulting it frequently myself too.