Roman Iberia: Economy, Society and Culture by Benedict Lowe

196 PHOENIX strong. The analysis of tum quod in 4.33.4 (269) is, I think, simply wrong (the argument shifts earlier, at ceterum in 4.33.3), but the reading of this sentence as a whole, with its strong-arming of “hostile readers,” is powerful. A bonus en route is a study of Cremutius Cordus’ earlier appearances in Seneca and Quintilian. In a provocative conclusion Sailor, tongue only half in cheek, invites us to imagine the Annals as deliberately incomplete, à la Lucan (for those who believe that). Certainly Koestermann’s theory that Tacitus abandoned Thrasea’s exitus mid-sentence, overcome by the desire to slit his own wrists,5 is welcome light relief. At the end, though, Sailor takes his leave with an unsatisfying conceit, that the unity of Tacitus’ voice resides “precisely . . . where we feel most keenly a contradiction between ‘our’ Tacitus and the one who fails to be the Tacitus we know” (321). No doubt it is inevitable that the conundrum that is Tacitus remains unsolved: Sailor must be right that “we cannot meaningfully pronounce” (320) on the genuineness of the “alienation effect” (321) he has explored. Still, one misses a head-on confrontation with the old thesis—which underlies in many ways Sailor’s own tracking through Tacitus’ literary career—that his works reveal a gradual descent from optimism to disenchantment. Even this substantial monograph would be a small space to do justice to the full scope of Histories and Annals. Selectivity is unavoidable, though Germania, Dialogus, and most strikingly the Annals proem are loud absences. Sailor makes his case compellingly, and writes lucidly and wittily; the text is clean, and translations scrupulously accurate (if strangely variable in tone). The monstrous bibliography on Tacitus is deftly navigated with polite firmness, though one important item slipped through the net. K. Freudenburg , Satires of Rome: Threatening Poses from Lucilius to Juvenal (Cambridge 2001), has some asides which anticipate to the letter Sailor’s arguments, as for instance “An air of risk is . . . attached to Tacitus’ own telling of martyr-tales . . . . But in his case, given when he wrote, there is good reason to suspect that the risk he hints at is all air, and no risk” (220); again (236, n. 50), on the “air of defiance” in the Cordus scene, “terribly convenient, and much too highly crafted, to merit uncritical acceptance.” A regrettable oversight, perhaps, but the thesis only derives strength from this repetition: here is a Tacitus whose ironies have outwitted his readers for even longer than we thought. University of Cambridge Christopher Whitton Roman Iberia: Economy, Society and Culture. By Benedict Lowe. London: Duckworth. 2009. Pp. viii, 230, 6 maps, 28 figures. The object of Lowe's book is not to discuss the history and public monuments of Roman Iberia, but rather “to explore the economic consequences of Rome’s conquest of the Iberian Peninsula” and “the economic underpinning of the process of Romanization” (1). He does this by focusing on economic activities that have left archaeological traces: villas, wine and oil production, mining, and marine products. Cereals receive considerably less attention than liquid exports, by virtue of the massive quantity of surviving amphoras. It should be noted that the “society” of the subtitle is mostly limited to Italian immigration, while the only “culture” I could detect was villa decoration. 5 E. Koestermann, “Tacitus und die Transpadana,” Athenaeum 43 (1965) 167–208, at 207–208. BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 197 After a brief survey of Romanization theories and ancient exchange mechanisms (Chapter One), Lowe looks at Phoenician and Greek colonization in Iberia (Chapter Two). This is not really relevant to Roman Iberia, but like many writers, Lowe cannot resist the romantic allure of the fabled kingdom of Tartessos, plausibly identified with the Rı́o Tinto district of modern Huelva province. He rightly emphasizes that there were Phoenician colonies on the Atlantic coast and in Cataluña (north-east Spain), not just on the south coast as formerly supposed. The reader may be puzzled, after being informed that the ores of Rı́o Tinto “yield gold, silver and lesser quantities of copper, lead and iron” (14), to learn that the Phoenicians traded luxury goods with Tartessos...

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