| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Ancient and Medieval

Ramsay MacMullen. Romanization in the Time of Augustus. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2000. pp. xi, 222. $25.00.

In his latest book, Ramsay MacMullen continues his enviable tradition of identifying a subject with wide implications and dealing with it concisely. The book is a timely contribution to our revitalized assessment of a pivotal period. In the long wake of Sir Ronald Syme's classic The Roman Revolution (1939), the Augustan era was viewed as the outcome of one man's autocratic will; following Tacitus, the emphasis was relentlessly on Roman politics and the individual will to power. 1

Recent studies have widened that perspective considerably, taking into account the Mediterranean (and beyond) scope of the Augustan empire and the cultural and social revolutions that were well under way even before Augustus took over. One of the distinctive phenomena of the epoch was, as MacMullen can state without hyperbole, that "never was greater progress made toward one single way of life, a thing to be fairly called 'Roman civilization of the empire,' than in that lifetime of Augustus" (p. x). The obvious questions arise: how did the process work? What are the parameters of "Romanization"? Was there a centrally guided cultural policy? What is the role of "ideology"? . . .

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