The Final Pagan Generation by Edward J. Watts

198 PHOENIX collegia in this period. Coming primarily from high-ranking senatorial families, these civic patronesses were likely expected to use their informal power to help their client communities. Due to the gaps in social status and geographical distribution between patronae and matres, Hemelrijk argues that the two titles were not synonymous, suggesting instead that the emergence of matres points to the increasing domestication of public life in this period when financial pressures on local elites were increasing. This idea of the domestication of public life appears again in Chapter Six, “Female Presence: Public Honour and Representation,” where Hemelrijk demonstrates that elite women were honored with public statues most often as part of a family statuary group, and that women were fully involved in setting up and paying for statues for family members, including themselves. The timeless style of clothing and dignified poses of the statues, together with the inscriptions on the statue bases, further conveyed the woman’s exemplary status and thus justified the privileges of her elite social class. In this regard, women’s public statues served much the same purpose as those of their male relatives and thus serve to underscore the integration of elite women into civic life in the Roman West. Among several important observations in the concluding chapter, Hemelrijk corrects the notion that prominent women in their local communities were taking their cue from the women of the imperial family, arguing instead that a system of mutual influence between empresses and elite women of the Roman West is more plausible. In sum, Hemelrijk’s study helps to redefine both our notions of the roles of Roman women in their local communities and our perceptions of gender at work in the economic and political environments of Roman cities. This is a must read for classicists working on gender in the Roman empire, and especially for teachers of courses on women and gender in the Roman world. University of Notre Dame Elizabeth F. Mazurek The Final Pagan Generation. By Edward J. Watts. Oakland, CA: University of California Press (Transformation of the Classical Heritage 53). 2015. Pp. xvi, 327. This excellent book traces how the generation of Romans born in the 310s, an age cohort Watts dubs The Final Pagan Generation, experienced the history of the fourth century. These men and women spent their childhood in cities dominated by the smell of sacrificial meat, the noise of pagan festivals, and the sight of imposing neighbourhood shrines. The longest-lived among them died in a world in which animal sacrifice had been outlawed, bishops had become powerful civic leaders, and Christian activists had begun to demolish some of the empire’s most famous temples. By looking at the history of the fourth century through the eyes of one generation, Watts exploits the key insight of modern generational histories. The timing of social change is not merely the product of impersonal economic and social forces, but is influenced by the shared ways in which individuals of distinct age cohorts experience key events in their lives. Modern historians and sociologists map the social structure and self-understanding of generational groups through standardized questionnaires and detailed demographic analyses. Watts has no access to such data. Of necessity, his method is not quantitative, but qualitative. The book is structured around the lives of four exceptionally welldocumented (and long-lived) élite males: Libanius, a teacher of rhetoric from the ancient BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 199 metropolis of Antioch in Syria; Themistius, a suave philosopher and orator who became the chief propagandist of several fourth-century emperors; Ausonius (the only Christian in the group), a professor from Bordeaux, who for some years was the éminence grise at the imperial court in Trier; and finally, Vettius Agorius Praetextatus, a prominent member of the Roman nobilitas who was promoted by Valentinian and his son to the highest administrative posts in the western half of the Roman empire. The book is divided into ten chronologically arranged chapters, which retell the history of the fourth century through the eyes of these four individuals. It might be contested that, by focusing on this limited group of extremely successful male politicians and male intellectuals, the book precludes an...

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