Book Reviews 295

operation in 1957. Finally Peter Catterall discusses the present state of the literature on post-war British history and points to gaps, in a way that may well be helpful to graduate students looking for a research topic. Altogether the book may be said to have achieved its aim of illustrating a variety of topics and approaches: individual historians, interested perhaps in only one or two of the articles, may find the price on the high side.

University of Durham Anne Orde

Julio-Ciaudian Building Programs: A Quantitative Study in Political Management, M.K. and R.L. Thornton (Wauconda, Illinois: Bolchazy-Carducci, 1989), xviii+156 pp., $35.00, cloth; $20.00, paper.

This thin volume offers an analysis of imperial public works programs within sixty kilometers of Rome (and beyond, in the case of aqueducts) between 27 B.C. and A.D. 68, from the rule of Augustus through that of Nero. The Thorntons' thesis is that public building had an important economic impact on Rome and that the personality (and presumably political leadership) of emperors accounts for the differences in the character and degree of their respective building programs. In the absence of data on private building and the personalities of emperors, the evidence for this argument appears largely conjectural and slim.

Adopting a quantitative approach to a chronological analysis of individual emperor's public work programs, they frequently rely on projections and unverifiable assumptions. They claim that Rome's building programs were designed to legitimise political rule and to meet city inhabitants' needs for food, water, and entertainment. The idea that public building is a form of ideology that symbolically justifies political rule deserves further study. Unfortunately, the book never explores this quintessentially political use of public works, but is restricted to projects that provide food, water, and entertainment. Their finding that the major aqueduct projects to supply Rome's water needs account for building peaks during the century may not be consistent with the latter half of their thesis.

The Thorntons maintain that Augustus firmly established and organised the political force of public building and the emperor's power over it. The Augustan system of public works institutionalised a permanent water works staff, provided sound management under Agrippa, grounded the emperor's control in his personal payment for construction, and managed city manpower needs. Until Agrippa's death, his program was a planned one that legitimised his rule, addressed food and water supply needs, and managed the labor force.

Different emperors had their own impact on public building. However, the Thorntons tend to contradict that claim when they contend that Agrippa's death was largely responsible for the decline in building during the last fifteen years of Augustan rule and that Tiberius merely continued this pattern. If an emperor's personality is crucial, then the death of one advisor should not make that much difference. While they find that Caligula presided over construction of two aqueducts and expansion of the imperial residence, they present no compelling evidence that this was primarily a function of his personality rather than perceptions of Rome's water needs.

Their evidence is not much stronger for Claudius or Nero. They judge Claudius to have been an effective manager who successfully met Rome's food and water supply needs, but

296 Book Reviews

there is no clear link between his personality and the draining of Fucine Lake and construction of the harbor at Ostia. His achievements left Nero with the task of providing Romans the means of entertainment--the gymnasium, baths, ampitheater, and Circus Maximus--and rebuilding after the fire in A.D. 64. None of this argument rests on Nero's personality.

This is not to say that a ruler's personality is never important. Nor is it to suggest that a leader's management and decision styles and policy choices are insignificant or always unrelated to personality. The Thorntons acknowledge that broad political-economic needs shaped Roman public works programs. They want to establish that individuals do matter, that who was emperor also affected the character of Rome's public works program. Individuals often do make a difference, but their own evidence does not unambiguously support their central claims. What remains is the conviction that the effort to link directly and systematically a ruler's personality and his regime's policies fundamentally misconceives the nature of political life.

University of Cincinnati Charles E. Ellison

Les R~gicides: Clement, Ravaillac, Damiens, Pierre Chevallier (Paris: Arth~me Fayard, 1989), 419 pp.

One hundred years ago Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough argued that the killing of sacred leaders was a recurring, culturally imbedded theme within primitive societies. Today Frazer is out of fashion with anthropologists, but his normalcy thesis casts a shadow over historical analyses of regicide in advanced political cultures. Roland Mousnier's Assassination of Henry IV makes Ravaillac's killing of his sacred king ideologically plausible yet politically futile. Dale Van Kley's The Damiens Affairs and the Unravelling of the Ancien R~gime and Jeffrey Merrick's forthcoming book on desacralisation in eighteenth-century France show how many persons thought of killing Louis XV before and after Damiens superficially wounded the 'sacred bugger of a king'. Michael Walzer's Regicide and Revolution vindicates the ritualised 'public' regicides of Charles I and Louis XVI by the Puritan and French Revolutions by distancing them from previous 'private' regicides which he considers the work of conspiratorial or demented outsiders. We are just beginning to make psychological sense of the bullet taking the place of the ballot in American Presidential politics, and have yet to understand its relationship to political culture. (See James W. Clarke's American Assassins and his forthcoming On being Mad or Merely Angry: John IV. Hinckley, Jr and Other Dangerous Persons).

In purely methodological terms, Pierre Chevatlier's microscopic study of three early modern French regicides is a disappointing addition to regicide literature. Yet the author's intellectual doggedness results in new wisdom that transcends its traditional presuppositions. There is no notion here of 'political culture' as combining everything from closet philosophy to anything above a human grunt; time and again, ritualised acts and partisan myths are examined simply to get beyond the falsehoods to the Rankean ' truth' . Psychoanalysis and historical anthropology are absent apart from an aside that regicide could involve a 'catharsis' for a troubled society. Textual analysis, which almost overwhelms the reader as we move from tyrannicide sermons to regicide trial proceedings, is of the most conventional sort. There is a further disadvantage of the author trying to cover the three major regicide events of 1589, 1610 and 1757 as if the political context was