One might ask why another book is needed on Roman spies. With Austin and Rankov's Exploratio (1995) and Sheldon's Intelligence Activities in Ancient Rome (2005) one would think the field had been thoroughly mined. To the contrary, any book trying to survey all of Rome's intelligence activities can only skim the surface. It is not difficult for another specialist to expand one author's chapter into a new book, to view the topic from a different perspective, or to go boldly where no writer has previously gone. This latest contribution by Anna Maria Liberati and Enrico Silverio of the Museums of Roman Civilization is published as part of Bretschneider's series, Studia Archaeologica. The authors bring to the project a wide-ranging knowledge of Roman archaeology, epigraphy and Roman law.

The first two chapters cover the most original ground. They trace the relationship between the public and private in Republican Rome, scrutinizing especially its religious and judicial structures. It is in this milieu that local magistrates had to develop some sort of mechanism for keeping the city safe, policing the population, and detecting subversion. One fact on which all authors agree is that there was no formal information service in the modern sense of the word in the Republic. The Romans developed self-control mechanisms that made a centralized internal security service unnecessary while keeping the state safe from those who would try and restore the monarchy or commit treason.

As the Romans left the security of the Italian peninsula during the Punic Wars, so the authors leave the land of communis opinio on the subject on intelligence activities. They follow the interpretation of the Italian scholar, Giovanni Brizzi, who argued that Roman leaders were loyal to the idea of fides and averse to any use of underhanded methods in warfare. This supposed attitude remained an obstacle to victory against Hannibal until consciously discarded by Scipio. The authors seem blithely unaware of how often this interpretation has been dismantled (for example, J. Briscoe, JRS 73 (1983), A. Lintott, Gnomon 56, 6 (1984), Sheldon, Guerra Segreta nell'antica Roma (2008), and several works by E. L. Wheeler). They are on firmer ground in ch. 4 when they turn back to internal Roman affairs. They give a detailed discussion of the power struggle between Marius and Sulla, the proscriptions, the Catilinarian conspiracy and the rise in the use of informers and political assassination.

Chs 5 through 7 discuss the legal definitions, structure and function of the diverse groups which made up Rome's intelligence gathering capacity in the Empire: the speculatores, the exploratores, the frumentarii, and the agentes in rebus. Once again, they follow an Italian scholar, this time Purpura, while ignoring the English and German scholarship on the subject. They are certainly entitled to disagree with what has come before, but in a work of this size it is inexplicable that the authors should choose to completely ignore a body of scholarship on the very subject of their book. Totally absent is the work of Wilhelm Blum on the curiosi and regendarii, of Manfred Clauss on the frumentarii, speculatores and magister officiorum, of Davies on policing, Kneppe on internal security, Pekary on sedition, etc. The list is a long one and since all of these works were gathered in Espionage in the Ancient World: An Annotated Bibliography (2003), even identifying them does not take much work. At least a mention in the footnotes and the authors' basis for disagreement would have been helpful.

The disagreements between scholars exist, not because previous authors have failed to look at the same evidence (of which there is precious little anyway), but because there is a philosophical difference between those who see the work of Rome's security services as sinister and their collective activities as oppressive and corrupt (e.g. Sinnigen, Frank, Sheldon, Blum) and those who see these men as simply Roman bureaucrats upon whom a modern interpretation has been intruded (e.g. A. H. M. Jones, Liebschutz JRS 60 (1970) reviewing Blum). The latter group believes the former has been led astray by making analogy to modern secret police organizations, and there is no doubt that a scholar's view can be coloured by their own personal or national experience with the subject of secret police. There will always, however, be a divide between those who believe spying has always been the world's ‘second oldest profession’, with far fewer morals than the first, and those who do not want to acknowledge such behaviour in their beloved Romans.

Despite its flaws, this is a beautifully produced book, lavishly illustrated and filled with thoughtful discussions on Roman legal and epigraphical sources. The authors make many useful insights and discuss topics in greater detail than previous works. The 140 Euro price tag, however, will limit its distribution to libraries with a large budget willing to stock Italian titles. This will deprive it of the wider readership it deserves.