This book, which began as a dissertation written and defended at the University of Constance in 2014, is a study of the concept of decadence in Roman historiography. Rather than dismiss decadence as a rhetorical trope or a commonplace in ancient literature, Biesinger exposes the factious nature of decadence across diverse social and historical contexts. To set the stage for the analysis, Biesinger begins by explaining how decadence is different from decline. As an organic process, decline is neither positive nor negative. Since all entities experience a beginning followed by a zenith, decline, like decomposition, is inevitable and natural. Decadence, on the other hand, is heavily freighted with morality. Decadence assumes that there were fixed cultural and social virtues in the past (for example, obedience, sacrifice, and tribal values), which have been willfully, even violently abandoned. This abandonment of the past is presented as a violation of the natural order of creation. As a result, the present moment becomes a battleground between a positive past and a negative present. Conservative politics seeks to resist the encroachment of decadence and to restore the destroyed or threatened orders. Decadence is therefore almost always pejorative and a reproach against the protagonists of the present.

In the first chapter, Biesinger explains why the genre of historiography is well suited to an analysis of decadence. First, historiography is structured by time and change. Historical processes that move through time are constantly repositioned in each new age and therefore respond to changed and changing contexts. Second, historiography is inherently metahistorical; the cultural contexts of the historians’ own times inevitably leave traces on the works they produce. Third, history was produced and consumed by the socially privileged, those with closest access to the arenas in which decadence was wielded for political purposes. Finally, historiography falls squarely in the intersection between literary and political discourse, so that it is impossible to disregard as mere literary tropes the contests for power inherent in any representation of decadence.

The chapters then follow the chronological order of the Latin authors selected for study: Cato (pages 59–92), Sallust (pages 93–173), Livy (174–241), Augustan historical writings (pages 242–276); Velleius (pages 277–311), and Tacitus (pages 312–354). In the final chapter, Biesinger synthesizes the rhetorical, self-referential, and dynamic aspects of decadence in Roman historiography. He also provides three appendices: “The Great Romans in Sallust (Sall. Cat. 53);” “Contingency as Regularity of the Julio-Claudian Succession (Tac. Ann.);” and “The Failure of the Adoption of Piso by Galba in the Tacitean Account (Tac. Hist. 1, 12–19).” After the extensive and up-to-date bibliography, the indices are divided into names, places, things and theoretical concepts. The book is very well conceived and executed and constitutes in my opinion a solid contribution to our understanding of an important aspect of Roman historical writing.

Biesinger identifies Cato’s strategy of projecting decadence onto the youth in general, which allows an audience of senators to exempt themselves from criticism, since they are by definition elders. By stylizing the decadence of the youth as an extreme, the senators could imagine themselves as members of the better side of the argument (pages 90–91). Cato is of course a major figure in the history of decadence, for although his own works are woefully fragmentary, he is prominent in later Roman literature, and Biesinger pays special attention in subsequent chapters to Cato’s speech on the punishment of the Catilinarian conspirators in Sallust’s De coniuratione Catilinae as well as the synkrisis, and Cato’s speech on the Lex Oppia as recorded by Livy. Differences between Sallust and Livy emerge. For Sallust, the matrix of decadence on which he based his De coniuratione Catilinae, De bello Iugurthino, and what can be gleaned from the fragments of the Historiae, was a historiographic construction that he needed in order to be able to disqualify the political sector, from which he was expelled, as a worthy field of activity on an individual basis and to validate his own historiographic point of view (page 173). Livy’s introduction to his work was devoid of substantive statements that could have come to pass in the ensuing narrative; as a result, the Praefatio and its notions of decay remained timeless. Context is everything: the meaningfulness of decadence was determined by the particular situations over the long course of Roman history. The main difference, then, between Sallust and Livy is the conclusion that in Sallust, fatal decadence unfolds as a general characteristic in his historical works; for Livy, on the other hand, decadence seems to be omnipresent but its potential effect only threatens individual episodes. Biesinger concludes that Livy’s narrative was more flexible and therefore more capacious (page 240).

Because Biesinger pursues the Roman historians in chronological order, he accounts for allusions and intertextualities from one generation to the next. Thus Biesinger observes thematic and literary resonances between Sallust and Velleius, and concludes that Velleius demonstrates his own creative solutions to achieve decisive changes in the interpretations of luxuria by Sallust, with only slight interventions and impositions on the historiographical tradition. Although heavily influenced by the formulations of Sallust, Velleius was able to abbreviate and simplify his predecessor. While luxuria was a recurrent slogan in the works of Sallust, Velleius made luxuria the substance of the republican crisis (page 309). Yet both Sallust and Velleius couched their versions of luxuria and decadence in ways that were particular to their individual historical contexts, in ways that were intended to satisfy the individual audiences they were writing for.

By the time Tacitus wrote of luxuria in a digression in Annals 3.55, the topic had been covered extensively by Roman historians. Tacitus differs, however, in the degree of temporal complexity. It is difficult to ascertain precisely who is the target of the moralizing, when the digression interrupts the narrative of the reign of Tiberius with a reference to Vespasian, all of which was written by a historian living in a post-Flavian world, for better or for worse (pages 326–331). It is precisely this location of authors and works in their social and historical contexts that gives decadence its rhetorical force.

In the end, we learn slightly more about the historians and their self-presentations and slightly less about the phenomenon of decadence itself, but as a critical lens, decadence is highly illuminating. It is a medium by which the Roman historians can manipulate the representation of the past in order to influence directly the behaviors and attitudes of the present.