The posthumous reception of Augustus has become a major theme in work on the first Roman emperor in the last dozen years. The bimillennium of his death in 2014 was an obvious prompt to investigate what he has meant in the intervening 2000 years, but the trend also reflects the now well-established interest of ancient world scholars in its reception. My own 2018 volume, Afterlives of Augustus, AD 14-2014, offered an initial framework for approaching his reception history, but could not hope to be comprehensive. My intention was to provide a foundation for fuller studies, and I am thrilled to see new scholars doing just that.

Besl's book, based on his PhD, tackles receptions of Augustus between his death and c. AD 500. This was a critical period which has not yet been analysed on this scale. As Besl shows, Augustus remained a point of reference throughout, so that studying the era's engagement with him illuminates much about Roman political and literary culture. This was also the period during which Augustus' posthumous reputation and the source tradition recording it were consolidated. Thus Besl's study will provide a crucial platform for future work on the post-antique receptions which built on it.

Besl's goals, set out with admirable clarity in his introduction, are to examine the use of Augustus as a symbol and discursive object, and interpret the agendas driving it. The primary purpose for him is to advance our understanding of Roman political culture (13). As he astutely observes, we cannot understand the Roman political system purely through its structures and procedures. Rather, we must grapple with the communicative processes through which human agents navigated and shaped it. References to Augustus were used intensively in articulating and performing the system's values, interpretive categories, symbols and rituals, so that understanding those references illuminates its dynamics.

Also tackled in the introduction are the parameters of Besl's study, the nature of his sources, and scholarly thinking in fields such as reception studies and memory studies. All are outlined succinctly, bringing out key concepts without getting bogged down in internal debates. The advantage is that Besl can move swiftly on to his analyses. But in a couple of cases, further comment would have been useful. One is his decision to omit the early Christian source tradition around Augustus, which he states but does not justify (10). Sound rationales were available: for example, that the Christian material is extensive, has been examined fairly thoroughly, and operated largely separately from the pagan sources which are Besl's focus. But without being told this, the reader may doubt the validity of the decision.

In Part I of the main body, Besl discusses the use of Augustus by later emperors to legitimise their rule, and by the senatorial elite and provincial envoys to influence their behaviour. Both sides tended to idealise Augustus, with emperors claiming to follow his example (what Besl calls aemulatio Augusti), while their subjects demanded the same and increasingly asked them to surpass him. But a critical tradition which must rest on the lost literature of the civil war era re-emerged in the later Julio-Claudian period. Here, Seneca in his De Clementia foregrounded Augustus' violent rise to power and branded his later clemency mere exhaustion in order to make Nero look better by comparison (62-5). Nonetheless, Augustus remained a useful symbol into late antiquity, appearing frequently in the surviving panegyrics. Besl's suggested reasons for this include his status as founder of the principate, the initial lack of other good role models, and the fact that his usage throughout the Julio-Claudian period already made him into an established tradition.

Part II approaches the genre of historiography (including biography) as a forum for elite discourse. As Besl explains, authors used Augustus to reflect on the past and interpret and shape the present. Their discourses around him thus reflect their interests, especially regarding their own role within the principate. Three themes which they found pressing are tackled: the advantages and disadvantages of dynastic succession, Augustus as a benchmark against whom to judge later emperors, and the paradox inherent in securing peace through war.

Finally, Part III shows how the elite used Augustus as a moral exemplum and commented on his policies in order to rehearse and debate social norms. Particular interests explored by Besl include the motif of his good fortune, established during his reign and consolidated in the early Julio-Claudian period. Writers from Pliny the Elder onwards set this against his personal misfortunes, either to draw moral lessons about devotion to duty or to demonstrate the fickleness of human fortune. They were also naturally interested in freedom of spoken or written expression, generally presenting Augustus as relatively liberal on the issue in order to criticise or pre-empt suppression by later emperors.

The conclusion summarises Besl's main arguments and allows him to substantiate some important observations. One is that over time, some references to Augustus became part of a canon of imperial representation, and less attached to him personally (223). This continued beyond antiquity, leading for example to debates over whether Charlemagne was referring to Augustus personally, or merely the office of emperor, when he took the title. Another is that Augustus' public image was always ambivalent and that this sustained his ongoing relevance as a topic of debate. The concluding overview also bears out one of the contentions of Besl's introduction: that a holistic rather than piecemeal view of ancient receptions of Augustus is needed to contextualise individual emperors' responses, identify literary agendas and trace evolutions in both (16).

Perhaps the greatest strength of Besl's book is the range of source material tackled. The majority is literary, and Besl shows himself consistently attentive to the impact of genre. He recognises that Augustus must be the subject of some barbs in the Apocolocyntosis, as it is a satire, and understands that we cannot expect a consistent portrayal from the panegyricists, who selected the best material to fit their argument. A full range of documentary and artefactual sources are also considered, with particular prominence given to coins. As Besl notes, these have two major advantages: they are one of the most direct indexes we have of imperial self-representation and they preserve a relatively complete record of the original issues (23-24). As a result, they reveal changes in the intensity of engagement with Augustus in a way that the fragmentary literary record cannot. Besl largely explains his declining prominence in terms of growing distance in time and the availability of other models. But other factors could be considered. For example, did Tiberius and Caligula's usage of Augustus taint the model somewhat, helping to explain Claudius' restrained engagement?

But these are small points of debate and interpretation. The merit of Besl's work is that he has advanced our understanding of Augustus' ancient resonances, opening up such conversations. His book will be a major point of reference as work on Augustus' reception history continues.

Penelope J. Goodman