Martyrdom and Rome. By Glen W Bowersock. [The Wiles Lectures Given at the Queen's University of Belfast.] (NewYork: Cambridge University Press. 1995. Pp. xii, 106, $29.95.) This elegant volume, appropriately dedicated to the memory of Louis Robert, is a significant contribution to the reawakened interest in the political and social dimensions of Christian martyrdom, as well as in the martyrological narratives themselves. The narratives of the early Christian martyrs, for a long time the domain of experts in theology or church history, have increasingly come under the scrutiny of classical literary scholars and historians of Graeco-Roman antiquity. Their perspectives have two broad fronts. The first is a renewed attention to the texts as objects of literary criticism. In English-language scholarship alone, the concatenated efforts of Anne-Marie Palmer, John Petruccione, Michael Roberts, and Danuta Schanze on Prudentius' Peristephanon provide as good an example as any of these literary attentions. The other facet is marked by the increasing involvement of historians of the Roman empire with the problem of Christian martyrdom-an engagement which, for example, finds Antony Birley, a renowned political historian of the imperial period, working on a new edition of Musurillo's standard handbook of the canonical texts of the early martyrs. Iconoclasm and martyrdom are a and inflammatory mix, but it is precisely this combination with which Glen Bowersock, professor of history at the Institute for Advanced Study, confronts the reader in the four concise, precisely argued essays that constitute the core of this book. Originally delivered in 1993 as the Wiles Lectures at The Queen's University, Belfast-the author notes the powerful resonances with the political life of Northern Ireland-the leanly written essays form sequential investigations into the creation of the Christian concept of martyrdom, the manner of its literary recollection, the civic function of martyrs, and, finally, the problem of martyrdom and suicide. They are supplemented by an equal number of valuable appendixes on technical matters: the concept of protomartyr, the relationship of Ignatius to IV Maccabees, the problem of the Great Sabbath in the dating of the martyrdoms of Polycarp and Pionios, and the nature of the connections between the churches of western Asia Minor and the Lyon martyrdoms of A.D. 177. The arguments presented by Bowersock constitute a direct challenge to what might be called an etymological explanation of Christian martyrdom. This scholarly tradition, which is at the heart of many of the standard works on the subject, including Frend's Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church (1965), has long argued the case for finding strong causal roots of the Christian behavior in patterns established at the time of the Maccabean resistance to foreign rule, and in the Hellenistic Jewish literature that was part of the later interpretation of these traumatic events. Although he would perhaps not name it as such, what Bowersock prefers is an archaeological analysis of Christian martyrdom that seeks to understand the phenomenon more firmly within the context of Roman imperial society and to make the behavior of the martyrs both more Christian and, significantly, more Roman than is usually allowed. Bowersock, therefore, strongly questions traditionally held idees recues-not only the example of Socrates as a prefiguration of later Christian practice, but also, and much more controversially, the categorization of the voluntary deaths recorded in the Maccabean literature as martyrdoms. He insists that the shift in the fundamental meaning of the word (Greek: martus) from its bare original sense (of a witness to events or in courtroom proceedings) to its signification of a peculiar concept of death and suffering was one that took place in tandem with the very novelty of the Christian practice-the earliest known occurrences of the term martyr with the latter meaning being found in Greek texts of the mid-second century (pp. …