Augustus and the Family at the Birth qfthe Roman Empire. By Beth Severy. New York and London: Routledge, 2003, Pp, xiv + 280, 40 figs, $104,95 US cloth, Beth Severy's book, Augustus and the Family at the Birth of the Roman Empire, provides new and valuable insights into the effects that the transition from republic to imperial monarchy had on the aristocratic family unit. This work builds on the scholarship of Susan Dixon in The Roman Family' which was the foundational study of the functioning of the Roman family, from the law to marriage and children. Severy demonstrates how the Emperor Augustus' new imperial regime blurred the line between the public political sphere and the private domestic sphere in tems of the family's role in Roman society. In studying the Augustan age many scholars understandably have made Augustus their primary focus as the brilliant statesman wbo brought Rome into the new imperial era, but they have often failed :to consider how the family was a critical socio·poJitica] factor in the development of the new imperial state. The aim of Severy's work, which focuses primarily on Augustus' family, is to address the change from republic to empire, a sociopolitical system of competing aristocratic families to the constant supremacy of one family," as well as ..... the question of how onc family became a public institution," (3) The chapters df the book follow a roughly chronological organization from the late republic 130s Be) 10 the reign of the emperor Tiberius (AD 14-37) with each chapter subdivided into thematic units. The first chapter provides the reader with a foundation for the remainder of the book by discussing the elite Roman family as it existed in the late republic. Severy examines the socially constructed gender roles of men and women in the res publica (state), drawing on important works of gender theory such as Joan W. Scott's Gender and the Politics of His/Dry' The following two chapters deal primarily with the first half of Augustus' rule (30-12 Be) when the emperor was busy "restoring" the Republic by enacting laws that reconstructed the Roman family which had suffered moral decay as a result of civil conflict. Severy argues that Augustus' laws on marriage and family that werc imposed upon aristocratic men and women equatcd their onde private familial roles with civic duty and the success of the state. For the families of the empire now became the collective Roman family with Augustus as its paler jiJmilias (male head of the family). Severy shows how, by 13 !Be, Augustus' family or domus was developing into a symbol of the state thn!>ugh their public commemoration in coins and sculpture. Chapter 4 deals with the'l military and its rdle in consolidating Augustus' position as emperor and "father" of the Roman empire by placing male members of his family, such as his jsons Drusus and Tiberius, in key military positions which earlier had been the 5 Dixon, The Roman Family, (Ballimore: Johns Hopk..ins University Press, 1992). • JOan W. Scotl, Gender and the Politics a/History, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia UnIversity Press, 1999), 9\