Between Sahara and Sea Africa in the Roman Empire
By David J. Mattingly
ISBN: 978-0472133451
University of Michigan Press (2023) - $44.95
North Africa, despite not having nearly so great a modern cultural footprint as, say, Britain, was an incredibly important part of the Roman Empire. Its grain fed the Roman people, its horses raced in the Circus Maximus, its people served in the Roman army and ascended to the upper echelons of imperial administration. It was, in Mattingly's words, “a critical driver of the Empire” (p. 3). However, according to Mattingly, discussions of the region and its role in the Roman Empire have been lacking, and “tended to present a view of Africa seen from an outside, essentially Roman, perspective” (p. xix), favouring the military communities and a set of core cities in the provinces, treating the African inhabitants as passive. Even the name commonly used for the region, ‘Roman Africa’, is “a short-hand term for a rather top-down perspectiveamount of work that has been done on the archaeology of the region in recent decades, offering “a fresh perspective on the interactions between the Roman Empire and the indigenous peoples of North Africa” (p. xvii). Even the book's title, , reworked from Eugène Fromentin's , represents this shift, making Africa, not the Mediterranean, the starting point.