Imperial Ideals in the Roman West: Representation, Circulation, Power

456 PHOENIX the Weberian approach, which Rüpke does not entirely avoid, is that Roman religion is too easily reduced to a mere subdivision of politics, marked by festivals, euergetism, laws, banquets for the boys (among the elite), and parades and holidays (for everyone else). To balance Weber, we may need anthropology, in the theories of Victor Turner (liminality, communitas) and Clifford Geertz (the semiotic concept of culture); or perhaps John Searle’s theories of speech act (for the republic before public writing) and its extension to performance act (for the third century and after).3 Religion, minimally, is a way of understanding and interpreting the universe and one’s place in it. The Romans had great confidence in their religion, whether or not they individually believed in augury, anthropomorphism, or specific rituals. The understanding and assumptions that gave rise to that confidence were, precisely, the object of all that elite competition. The study of Roman religion cannot be confined to its pragmatic and political aspects while ignoring religion itself. As compelling as Rüpke’s conclusions can be, they are at times in danger of doing just that. University of Iowa Carin Green Imperial Ideals in the Roman West: Representation, Circulation, Power. By Carlos F. NoreÄ na. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. 2011. Pp. xxi, 456. NoreÄ na takes as his central theme the question of how the change in Roman government from republic to monarchy related to the major cultural changes that occurred at about the same time in the Roman empire and especially in the Roman west. Syme argued that the switch to monarchy drove cultural change; more recent work on the subject tends to see the advent of monarchy as a product of broader developments in society. Noreña proposes an alternative to these two viewpoints, one that seeks to explain these simultaneous changes “as the product of a more general convergence of ‘social power’ in the Roman world” (10). Noreña defines “social power” (a term coined by the sociologist Michael Mann) as “control over territories, resources, and persons, and . . . . the manner in which such control is organized, both logistically and symbolically”; this power “is mainly collective and institutional instead of individual, and it is situated not within societies, but rather within sets of overlapping and interconnected networks” (322). The emperor was “the critical ‘node’ ” (323) for these networks and functioned as a “symbolic glue” (324) that replaced the pure force that had held the empire together during the republic. This led to “a measure of ideological unification between the multiple actors who controlled the main power networks of the Roman world” (324) and in turn to a more stable form of government. This concept of the role of the emperor as an ethical and beneficent entity is central to the book. Noreña’s main thesis is that the emperor was systematically depicted as a “moral exemplar,” who “not only reinforced the power of the Roman state . . . but also increased the collective authority of the local aristocracies upon which the empire’s social and political order was based” (1). The core of the book is an attempt to prove this thesis by studying the iconography of the imperial coinage, based on the idea that this material 3 For example, V. Turner (ed.), Celebration: Studies in Festivity and Ritual (Washington, D.C. 1982); C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York 1973); J. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York 1995). BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 457 provides the largest body of evidence for the ideals that were associated with the emperor and, due to the fact it circulated throughout the (western) provinces, can plausibly be considered a medium for the dissemination of these ideals. Noreña’s focus is on the west because these provinces did not, as in some places in the east, have their own coinage. His chosen chronological range is a.d. 69–235, because not until 69 was the majority of western coinage produced in Rome itself, while after 235 the situation is made more complicated by a proliferation of short-lived emperors. The book is organised in three parts. In Part I, titled “Representation,” Noreña discusses the...

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