Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2017 -

DiLuzio (Baylor Univ.) addresses a topic both well known and understudied. Numerous scholars have investigated the role of women in Roman religion, but have focused almost exclusively on the vestal virgins. DiLuzio, however, offers the first detailed treatment of all attested female priesthoods in the Roman Republic. Her book is the most comprehensive treatment of the topic and a valuable contribution to the study of Roman religion. An introduction, seven chapters, and a conclusion explore the importance to Roman state religion of the numerous female priests that most studies of Roman religion neglect or ignore. The first chapter examines the flamen and flaminica Dialis--a married couple responsible for the worship of Jupiter. The second investigates Roman priestly couples in general. Chapter 3 studies various other minor but essential priestesses. The last three chapters consider the dress, religious activities, and political role of the vestal virgins. Twenty-one clear and judiciously chosen illustrations complement the argument well. DiLuzio writes readable prose and advances sensible arguments. Scholars of gender, religion, and Roman religion and history should read this book.Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries.

Garland (classics, Colgate) is a fine scholar who approaches the Greco-Persian wars from an unusual angle, heralded by his book's title, Athens Burning. As he points out, though the Persians destroyed the city not once but twice within a year, hitherto, no book has been devoted primarily to the civilian aspect of the war--in particular, to the advance evacuation and unexamined emotional suffering of thousands upon thousands of refugees. Put like that, the scene is immediately relevant today, and Garland's narrative well gauges the kind of hysterical anxiety and ultimate misery that surely accompanied the mass displacement and bleak destruction to which the refugees twice returned. This awareness lends a sharp psychological realism to Garland's understanding of much-disputed evidence, especially the famous evacuation decree (in a third-century BCE copy) and the alleged patriotic Oath of Plataea (both often dismissed as forgeries). On top of all this, the bibliography is up-to-date, the penetrating "Note on Sources" is valuable for specialists as well as general readers, and the narrative is extraordinarily balanced and convincing. All this in 170 pages. This book is by far the best basic introduction to its subject now available in English.Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries.

Cassius Dio, a Roman imperial official and historian who wrote in Greek in the third century CE, is an indispensable authority for the study of Roman history. He has nevertheless not been the subject of the same degree of sustained scholarly inquiry that has advanced understanding of other ancient historians' contexts, aims, and methods. The present volume, the inaugural contribution to the editors' "Historiography of Rome and its Empire" series, represents a superb correction of that deficiency. The 16 chapters (written by a combination of international experts and more junior scholars) explore such topics as Dio's political philosophy, his use of rhetoric, and ancient strategies of resistance to tyranny and present new historical interpretations of the most important sections of his work to survive. Individual chapters shine light on Dio's complex engagement with issues of cultural identity and the historian's duty to ideals of freedom. Taken as a whole, the volume illuminates Dio's literary and historical methods and his place in later Roman society. The book is welcoming to nonspecialists (all Greek is translated) but does not sacrifice the level of detail and is very-well-produced overall.Summing Up: Essential. All academic levels/libraries.

This superbly researched work, named from a line in a Hittite oath and authored by an archaeologist and emeritus professor at the University of Zurich, is a political, military, social, and cultural history, illustrated in black and white, of pre-Byzantine Turkey, starting in the Paleolithic and ending in the early fourth century CE. Marek knowledgeably synthesizes huge arrays of information, covering Stone Age sites like Gobekli Tepe and Catalhoyuk; Bronze Age societies, including fine sections on the Hittites, Phrygians, and Troy; and Iron Age societies--first a Persian section summarizing Pierre Briant's From Cyrus to Alexander (2002), then a Greek section, including Agesilaus, Alexander, and his successors, the Seleucids, and the Attalids, and, finally, the Roman period, with a section on strata of religion in Asia Minor over the centuries. Appendixes include lists of pre-Roman rulers and Roman provincial governors and chronological tables. The writing, translated beautifully into English from German, is fluid enough to appeal to interested non-specialists. One perceives the ghost of wonderful generalist works like Norman Davies's Europe: A History (CH, Jul'97, 34-6430). Scholars and laypersons with modern interests should certainly enjoy this book.Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries.

This exciting, accessible book about finance in the Roman Republic breaks new ground and challenges old paradigms. Tan (history and classics, Hofstra Univ.) argues that the Republic remained a "thin" state (one with limited bureaucratic or enforcement capabilities) through the deliberate machinations of its elite, who profited from Rome's empire by exploiting its limits while ensuring that the treasury received just enough to maintain the systems by which they benefited; furthermore, once Rome stopped requiring citizens' financial contributions for its wars, there was little connection between foreign policy and those citizens' needs. This relationship between profiteering abroad and politics at home develops throughout the book, emerging most clearly in the valuable chapters on tax farming and rent seeking. The book's first half, presenting the author's hypothesis in general terms, is complicated by the second half, in which Tan explores change over time through three case studies from the third and second centuries BCE. Here, the limits of the evidence emerge starkly, and a few data points must bear more than they can sustain. The argument is nevertheless vitally important for ancient historians; modern economic theorists will also gain much from this study.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Most levels/libraries.

Kulikowski (Penn State Univ.) begins where Edward Gibbon began in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), with the Antonine Age, Gibbon's "happiest period of mankind." The volume ends with the last pagan emperor, Julian, but there will be a second volume, which reminds readers that the Roman Empire did not end with its disintegration in Western Europe. This wonderfully readable book makes its surefooted way through the vast amount of recent research and is less burdened by Enlightenment ideology than Gibbon's great work. Kulikowski begins with the flawed emperor Hadrian and continues to Marcus Aurelius, when the storm clouds begin to gather. Once the book comes to the Severan dynasty, readers realize that the Roman Empire Virgil eulogized has disappeared. It has become multicultural and autocratic. Particularly welcome is Kulikowski's treatment of Constantine I, who changed the imperial mind-set. He left a pagan empire Christian, with a Christian ideology that would henceforth inform imperial discourse. Julian's attempt to revive paganism could not change that, though a more astute man might have done better. This is a splendid book, and the sequel is much anticipated.Summing Up: Essential. Most levels/libraries.