Abstract

In 1989 Wallace-Hadrill published a now-classic book review article entitled "Rome's Cultural Revolution" which hailed Paul Zanker's The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus as the most significant interpretation to appear since Sir Ronald Syme's 1939 The Roman Revolution. At the same time, however, Wallace-Hadrill questioned whether identifying what was distinctive about the age of Augustus also required isolating it from the long process of cultural change and contrasting it to the vicissitudes of the period of the late Republic which preceded it. This question in many ways becomes the point of departure for Wallace-Hadrill's 2008 monograph, Rome's Cultural Revolution, which analyzes the longue durée of the transformation of Roman culture in Italy from the fourth through the first century B.C.E. in order to map a social and cultural revolution parallel to Syme's political one. Augustus himself claimed he had the allegiance of "tota Italia" at Actium, and for Syme the ascendancy of Augustus marked the triumph of the "Italian bourgeoisie"—"parsimonious, successful in business life, self-righteous and intolerably moral"—over the Roman nobiles. Thanks to Wallace-Hadrill's deft interpretation, the complexities of the multiple identities of "tota Italia" start to come into focus.