In this book Richardson takes us on a wonderful journey through the ways in which the Romans conceptualized the creation of their empire from the third century b.c. to the second century a.d. He does so by carrying out a judicious and highly calibrated linguistic analysis of the words imperium and provincia. At the time of the Hannibalic War, imperium meant an order, as well as the power to issue orders held either by a magistrate, a pro-magistrate, or by the Roman people, while provincia meant the sphere of influence within which the magistrate could exercise his imperium. In the course of the four centuries taken into account, imperium came to signify an entity limited by geographical boundaries under a unifying authority and constituted by territorial units, the provinciae. Key steps in the transformation of what R. vividly calls the biographies of these terms were the activities of Pompey in the 60s b.c. and Augustus' rise to power. At the beginning of the first century a.d., as Ovid's elegies attest, these conceptual changes were already in place, reaching full maturity in the course of the century, as an exhaustive analysis of the Julio-Claudian evidence shows.

If the results of this research are not entirely unexpected, this is because R. himself has already done much to teach us that this may have been the likely outcome of this research. The methodology, on the other hand, is novel and, in my opinion, the true achievement of this work, which will stand the test of time. Very few ancient historians, and even less so in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, have carried out such a thorough lexicographic study in an attempt to reconstruct ‘the general attitudes, as what might be described as “the mental wallpaper” of a section of society, which are not specifically argued about in our sources precisely because they are taken for granted by those who wrote and spoke at that time’ (7–8). The enterprise requires a titanic effort and is a difficult one to carry out.

The basic idea behind the work is the analysis of all attestations in documentary and literary evidence of the two notions of imperium and provincia, in search of their common denominator, which could signal the general attitude of the Romans towards empire at that specific time. As R. states, essential to this kind of study is the support of electronic databases (such as Musaios, the Idealist, and those produced by the Packard Humanities Institute) which allow for a more thorough search and faster statistical analysis of words than the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae and the Oxford Latin Dictionary could provide. The two appendices, one on Cicero's and one on Livy's use of the words imperium and provincia, show some of the groundwork which could be done thanks to these electronic tools.

Although R. applies this methodology with the utmost care, giving, for example, full consideration to Cicero's context and rhetorical strategies or Livy's sources, personal ideas and use of language, this approach is not without its problems. The absence of the use of a word does not, necessarily, imply the absence of a concept. This word search will only highlight a specific moment in the biographies of these terms, that is when the concept and the word are one and the same. Equally, the search focus on two words, imperium and provincia, cannot allow a complete reconstruction of the Roman ‘mental wallpaper’ about the building of their empire — although it would certainly play a major rôle in it. It would be necessary to investigate systematically related terms, such as dicio, orbis terrarum et similes, which make only sporadic appearances in R.'s work. The application of this methodology also leaves unsolved the most dynamic aspects of this conceptual transformation. If the Roman and, to a certain extent, the élitist focus is clear, the rôle that the wider community of the language users played in its transformation is less evident. Would not the use that Roman soldiers in Gaul made of the words imperium and provincia play a part in Caesar's adoption of the term? The active engines of these conceptual changes end up in the background. To what extent are the conceptual modifications which R. identifies with Pompey's activities ascribable to the initiative of Pompey himself? Or was the Roman general responding to something? And if so, what? The broad chronological approach and the discussion on Augustus seem to suggest prima facie that the factors behind these conceptual transformations are to be found in changes of a socio-economic nature. However, R. also hints at the rôle played by cultural and intellectual factors, such as, for example, Greek philosophical ideas of the geographical nature of the world. However, neither this issue nor the question of how the status of polysemy is solved at a certain time is part of R.'s investigation.

However, these observations simply attest the value of this book, a mine of precious attestations, epigraphic as well as literary, and very perceptive interpretations (despite the odd case of disagreement, as in the case of Scipio's fragment at p. 54, where R. interprets the reference to imperium as that of the Roman people rather than of a single individual). The merits of this work are not limited to the light it sheds on the history of the concept imperium and its related term provincia, however laudable per se and intellectually self-sufficient. Mapping the work in the wider context of theoretical studies on the nature of empire, R. provides an excellent example of the most fruitful interaction between ‘theory’ and very close reading of ancient sources. Combining these elements, R. shows that ‘in the taxonomy of the empires … the distinction of the empires that the Romans were creating between the second century b.c. and the second century a.d. is that between power-by-conquest and power-as-possession’ (193), offering also a very important contribution to the study of Roman imperialism.