This book places the Roman world and the Middle Ages side by side in a pragmatic exploration of the working out of delegated power. An alert editorial introduction is followed by eighteen papers, divided into five sections. Taken individually, these contributions will certainly hold the interest of readers in their particular fields. The first section approaches the problem from a series of angles: we have Michel Sève on the officium of the governor of Asia at a time of war against Mithridates; Audrey Becker on delegation in fifth-century Romano-barbarian diplomacy; Pierfrancesco Porena on power and delegation in Ostrogothic Italy; and Ignazio Tantillo on the accumulation of powers by comites and praesides in the fourth century. The second section is more suggestive of a joined-up history: we begin with Michel Humm on the hierarchies of powers and magistracies under the Republic, which dovetails with Stéphanie Benoist on the notion of delegation from princeps to legati between Augustus and the fourth century. These are followed by two high imperial papers — Frédéric Hurlet on ‘rituals of mediation’ between emperor and governor, which dovetails with Agnès Bérenger on delegation from governor to legates. Historians of Late Antiquity will also want to turn to the book's fifth section — on the working out of hierarchy and delegation in the Church — which opens with François-Xavier Romanacce on the relation of bishop and deacon from the third to the fifth centuries.

Conversely, the main comparative effect of this volume across ancient and medieval history relies largely on the reader's willingness to move between sections and to ponder what their juxtaposition might show. The third part explores the oversight and accountability of administrators from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries in three papers. The fourth examines late medieval notions about office, also in three papers. The concluding, ‘ecclesiastical’ portion (four papers in all) takes the case of the Church up to the fifteenth century.

To the present reviewer, this juxtaposition seems entirely worthwhile. The most lasting impression with which these papers leave us is that the Roman Empire and the later Middle Ages are remarkably susceptible to mutual comparison. At the heart of this comparability is a peculiar nexus of evolving characteristics that shaped the delegation and exercise of power: (i) a monarchy with growing claims to absolutism; (ii) an increasingly developed court; (iii) a geographical compulsion to delegate administration; (iv) an ever more sharply perceived need to monitor and restrain the delegates of royal power; and (v) a concomitant tendency for aristocrats in the localities to see themselves, ever more self-consciously, in relation to central power. This nexus of qualities is, of course, particularly apparent in the age of Diocletian or Theodosius I; and we are accustomed to finding it in the seventeenth-century France of Louis XIV, or the eighteenth-century Russia of Catherine the Great. But precisely because the present volume stops short of the Baroque age of early modern absolutism, what it gives us is a refreshingly fluid view of the problems of power, delegation and supervision.

That these problems were already consciously diagnosed by those who lived with them is a point reinforced with great lucidity by Frédérique Lachaud's dissection (311–38) of The Governance of England (otherwise known as the Monarchia or The Difference between an Absolute and a Limited Monarchy) by Sir John Fortescue. Fortescue was a long-serving Chief Justice of the King's Bench under Henry VI. What was at issue in his contrast of ‘dominium regale’ and ‘dominium politicum et regale’ was a point that ancient panegyrists had sought to finesse — the question of rule by monarchical decree versus rule with the assent of the governed. The point was no mere abstraction. To Fortescue, the health of the state required effective counsellors and office-holders. As Lachaud teases out, he had some specific observations to offer. What one senses is that, were they placed in the same room, Fortescue and Ammianus Marcellinus would in many respects have conversed in the same language of power. Fortescue's was more of an insider's view looking out, while Ammianus looked inward towards the consistory. But they had both, in their different ways, ‘kissed the purple’ — and had both learned to scan, with a critical eye, their fellow agents of the throne.