The emphasis on "staging" in the title should not be taken literally. Although the Octavia is conspicuously a theatrical script, the only historical play to survive intact from the Roman period, little attention is given in the book to its dramatic qualities or issues of performance, and the author's pro forma statement that "the significance of its dramaturgy informs my reading throughout" (p. 16) will convince no one. It is the book's subtitle that better indicates its real subject, the vocabulary and themes of empire and civil war as filtered through the language of the Octavia's text. Ginsberg's main contention is that the play, set in AD 62 dealing in the manner of tragedy with the situation of Octavia, divorced and subsequently executed by Nero, functions as a critique and condemnation not just of the last of the Julio-Claudian emperors but of the whole dynasty established by Augustus, and of its imperial underpinnings. This is not unconnected with her dating of the play's composition to the early 70s shortly after the civil wars following Nero's fall from power and Vespasian's establishment of a new imperial regime.

Ginsberg's literary approach follows a purist type of historicism that reads the text as explicable in terms of the political context of its origin, packaged in the fashionable terminology of "cultural memory" (p. 11). The Octavia is reconfigured as a series of ideological positions that can be scrutinised and dismantled as the text is unwrapped. Pervading and dominating the entire discussion is the rhetoric of intertextuality, without which the book's argument would have no foundation. Ginsberg seeks to identify in the play's language echoes of earlier Augustan and Julio-Claudian writings, from Augustus' own Res Gestae, to the elegies of Propertius, the didactic verse of Manilius, the lyrics of Horace and, above all, the epic poems of Virgil and Lucan. The Introduction explains and justifies the critical methodology to be followed, offers a preview of the chapters and a brief summary of the content of the Octavia.

Some parts of the book, which originated in a doctoral thesis at Brown University, have been previously published, including much of chapter 1. This focuses on echoes of Lucan and Virgil in the presentation of both Octavia and Agrippina, comparing Octavia with Lucan's Pompey (among others) and Agrippina's death with those of Priam and Dido in the Aeneid. A close intertextual link is proposed between Octavia's reference to portents of divine anger including a comet (at lines 227–37) and earlier passages in the Georgics, Horace and Lucan referring to Caesar's assassination and its aftermath.

The strongest part of Ginsberg's case is focused on the agon between Nero and Seneca in the play's second act, which is allocated all of chapters 2 and 3. This is not surprising, since these characters clash on the subject of what Augustus stands for as a model of imperial rule. Seneca's account of Augustus echoes in particular Augustus' own language, imperial imagery, and association with certain virtues like Clementia, but passes over his bloodstained rise to power. Nero's response reverses this emphasis and expands on the more negative interpretation of Augustus' career via allusions, if we go along with Ginsberg's reasoning, to Propertius, Lucan and Virgil.

Chapters 4 and 5 turn to the portrayal of the Roman populace in the play, especially as represented by the chorus. This concerns the civil disturbances in Rome in support of Octavia dramatised within the action of the play along with their suppression by the emperor. Ginsberg argues for heavy borrowing of the language of civil war from the Aeneid, Horace, and Lucan as well as from less obvious sources like Sallust, Lucretius and Livy. In line with most other scholars Ginsberg agrees that the first two choral lyrics at 273–376 and 669–89 are spoken by a body of citizens, but significantly diverges from other readings of the play in claiming that the second chorus between lines 762 and 819 represents a different and opposing group of citizens. She draws the implication that the citizenry, far from being shown in a positive light, is portrayed as divided, factionalised and inherently prone to self-destructive violence. (One wonders how an audience made up of Roman citizens might have reacted to this unflattering portrayal of themselves in the theatre!) To cap this interesting and provocative reading, she then opts (page 163) to understand the choral passages in the final scene from line 877 as "the combined voices of the two choruses of the Roman people". This, though, surely undermines the previously articulated case for viewing the Roman people as fatally and incorrigibly disunited.

There is finally an Epilogue (unfortunately misprinted as "Epiglogue" in the header of the odd numbered pages), mostly devoted to arguing against a Galban date of composition as proposed in some recent publications. In this, Ginsberg's argument is sound, though it should have been made part of the Introduction, since the early Flavian dating is not a conclusion that arises out of the preceding discussions but preconditions them, especially the treatment of the Roman people and the chorus in chapters 4 and 5.

This book will be of less interest to students of Roman literature or drama than to historians with a penchant for early imperial ideology. The actual play as drama has little interest to Ginsberg in that she says little about the characterisation and emotional dimensions of Octavia, Agrippina and Poppaea other than what relates to their political exemplarity. The debate between Seneca and Nero in act 2 has two distinct parts divided at line 533. The first, in which they clash over the privileges and duties of an emperor is the subject of two chapters, but the second part, more crucial to the development of the plot, in which they clash specifically over the expulsion of Octavia, is almost wholly ignored. The same goes for the interaction of Nero with the Prefect where again the second part (after line 859), which turns from retribution against the populace to retribution against Octavia, receives minimal attention. Ginsberg's commentary (pp. 175–8) on the concluding eleven lines of the play (973–83), spoken by the chorus, is restricted in focus to the last line (that refers to civic bloodshed), bypassing the comparison of Octavia with Iphigenia that occupies the previous ten lines. The portraits of Nero and Octavia are rendered inconsistent, since Nero, we are asked to believe, is presented sometimes as a brutal, self-centered tyrant but elsewhere as a perceptive and enlightened political theorist; and identifying Octavia variously with Pompey, Aeneas, Turnus and Dido (p. 58) is likely to do little more than baffle a reader, let alone an audience.

Ginsberg's argument breaks up the dramatic sequence, resituating passages of dialogue from the interactive contexts in which they occur. Perhaps the clearest case concerns the chorus in chapter 5, since the various interventions of the chorus are approached as a self-contained grouping of passages rather than in relation to their individual preceding and following scenes. Initially we might be persuaded by her suggestion that the chorus at line 762 represents a collective of Roman citizens, since the previous choral odes were public, political statements also spoken by citizens, albeit different ones. But if we return lines 762–79 to their context, we note that they follow immediately upon the scene revealing Poppaea on the morning after her marriage to Nero, a scene obviously located inside the palace. The mythical analogies are erotically charged, contrasting markedly in tone and reference with the previous choruses, and the lines are specifically addressed to Poppaea (line 769). Subsequently the members of the chorus ask questions of the messenger as he makes his way in to report to Nero. To take another case, the choral lyric at lines 924–57 when detached from its context can be argued to serve as an extension of the political reflections of earlier choral passages, in its listing of the fates of other women of the ruling family; but by restoring this passage to its context we are reminded that it is not presented as a specifically political comment to the audience but is addressed to Octavia, and that its primary rationale is consolatory and relates primarily to the emotional dimension of the scene rather than to the political and inhumane conduct of previous emperors. This same problem also damages the logic of Ginsberg's treatment of Seneca, since she examines his and Nero's speeches in separate chapters, as if they were discrete political pronouncements rather than two parts of an interdependent dialogue. Seneca's praise of Augustus' policy of clemency cannot be separated from his purpose of diverting Nero from assassinating Plautus and Sulla (lines 437–40). His aim is not ideological and retrospective, to justify Augustan policies, but immediate and pragmatic, to forestall further murders. Historical examples are used by the speakers in the play to support arguments about the rights and wrongs of specific actions in the present. Ginsberg's whole project is based on taking the supporting examples as the main point. Inevitably this serves to marginalise the dramatic events of AD 62 that the play re-enacts.

The long list of claimed intertexts is vitiated by selectivity and special pleading. The influence of the historical Seneca's works, like the De Clementia, is elided, giving the impression that the playwright is directly echoing, for instance, the Res Gestae rather than Seneca's own allusions to Augustus' writing. Analogies from Roman history and Trojan myth are highlighted in preference to those associated with less politically loaded myths that are also cited in the play (Electra, Iphigenia, Leda, Europa, Danae, Semele, Alcmene). Lucan's Bellum Civile is often identified as an intertext, but not the other Neronian civil war poem composed by Petronius, despite the latter's emphasis on the attitudes of the urban populace and concluding portrait of triumphant Discordia, central themes of the book. Some of the verbal echoes are so faint, often a single word or common phrase, that they would be barely noticeable except by a computer. Nero uses the word "victor", hardly uncommon in Latin, at line 525, but Res Gestae is claimed as the reference (page 110) rather than any of the other potential antecedents including the first line of the afore-mentioned Petronian Bellum Civile. The mere use of the common verb "ruere" ("to rush") at line 787 is treated as sufficient in itself to evoke Horace's epodes (page 130). Manilius' Astronomica is identified as an intertext (pages 100–101) on the basis of a transitional expression ("nec finis", 514) meaning literally "nor was this the end", equivalent to saying "and furthermore". A standard strategy in the book is to hang an intertext on a flimsy verbal parallel often consisting of a single word, and then to extrapolate at length the ways in which the Octavia passage differs from its "source". The same trick played over and over again soon loses its magic. Ginsberg does not seem to realise that the repetition of only a single word or common expression between two authors writing on a similar theme adds up to compelling evidence for the absence of meaningful allusion.

This book leaves the author open to the criticism that her interpretation detracts from the political and historical significance of the Octavia by narrowing its frame of reference to the period between the rise of Augustus and the demise of Nero. The last line of the play carries no such periodising restriction: "Rome revels in the blood of her citizens". Even on Ginsberg's own evidence, the text embraces a much wider sweep of Roman history: the murder of Caesar, the civil war of Caesar and Pompey, the tribunate of Livius Drusus (lines 887–9); Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus (882–6); Appius Claudius and the tyranny of the Decemvirs (295–300), even going back to the expulsion of the Tarquins (294; 301–309) and the beginning of the republic. On the other hand, in opting to employ him as a character the playwright utilised Seneca's reputation as a philosopher to give a universalising character to the debate in the second act on power and leadership, for which the model of Augustus was adduced in the capacity of an illustration. The disputed point of philosophical principle, concerning the responsibilities of the ruler to the ruled, was as relevant to Vespasian and all later emperors as it was to Nero, and is no less a matter of pressing political consequence today.