funding and the trend towards uniformity during the first two centuries AD, “and questions whether they could really be described as a tool setting a ‘Roman’ stamp on the great cities of the eastern provinces” (p. 4). Why were colonnades apparently not adopted in the West? Burns is clearly right that eastern cities had greater experience of, and wealth for, urban development than the generally much newer urban centres in the Western provinces. He also notes the vigour of architectural expertise and innovations in the East in the period. The suggestion that climate was also a major consideration does not convince, however, for much of the Western Mediterranean was just as sun-blasted. Burns is also undoubtedly right that a fundamental driver for such monumentalisation was intense competitiveness between cities, through the agency of their wealthy ruling classes who also vied amongst themselves for prestige through the creation of the grandest cityscapes. But it is less clear that he has fully identified the dynamics of this competition, which “By the second century […] had assumed the proportions of an architectural arms race” (p. 232)— perhaps a more telling metaphor than Burns appreciates. He remains convinced that schemes like colonnaded streets were in some way about the eastern cities engaging with Rome. Certainly, the emperor was the highest source of patronage in the second century; benefaction was bestowed in part through access to the finest building stones from Egypt and the Aegean, increasingly an imperial monopoly. Nevertheless, Burns concludes that these phenomena “require a “more than Roman” explanation” (p. 319). The explanation is, however, perhaps fundamentally other than Roman. It was instead about continuity of Hellenistic-era competition between the city-states of the region, now pursued under Roman hegemony, but not in Roman terms. Formerly, rulers and aristocrats, cities and states of the Eastern Mediterranean region had competed for power and prestige, not least through the fiercest means of all: warfare. If imposition of the pax romana facilitated undisturbed economic growth, generating the wealth needed for great building schemes, then reciprocally, eliminating war removed a primary theatre of competition. Under Rome, eastern oligarchs and cities still competed for honour and status, but rather than through clashes of arms it was now through trying to out-build each other. Further, this continuing competition, materially expressed through evolving Greek architectural traditions, was still seen in explicitly Greek terms through adherence to Hellenistic cultural norms and practices that owed nothing to Rome. On the contrary, Hellenising culture, especially paideia (Greek education), was internationally prestigious, and adopted and adapted by the Roman elite. Indeed, under Roman rule there was an overt revival of Greek literary culture, the Second Sophistic, climaxing around the same time as urban monumentalisation, both arguably aspects of a single, larger phenomenon. The eastern fashion for colonnaded streets was not about Roman imperial norms; it was primarily about establishing cultural and political status within a still-Hellenistic world, albeit one encapsulated within a Roman universe. Burns’s book does not clearly establish the origins of the colonnaded streets of the Roman empire’s eastern cities, and opinions may differ on why they became so widespread; nonetheless, this a welcome and valuable study of a remarkable architectural phenomenon. Simon James School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester, UK (Email: stj3@le.ac.uk) Susan T. Stevens & Jonathan P. Conant (ed.). North Africa under Byzantium and Early Islam. 2016. Cambridge (MA) & London: Harvard University Press; 978-8-8402-4088 £50.95. This is a superb volume, rich in detail, and impressive in its inter- disciplinary assessment of the transformation of North Africa in the Late Antique and Early Islamic periods. The volume’s 15 chapters are organised under three rubrics: ‘Contesting Byzantine Africa’, ‘Shifting structures of daily life’, and ‘Africa in the Christian Empire’. Book reviews © Antiquity Publications Ltd, 2018 1407 Book reviews