BMCR 2006.04.04, Andrew Bell, Spectacular Power in the Greek

Andrew Bell, Spectacular Power in the Greek and Roman City.  Oxford/New
York:  Oxford University Press, 2004.  Pp. viii, 289.  ISBN
0-19-924234-8.  $125.00.

Reviewed by Kathleen Coleman, Harvard University
(kcoleman <at> fas.harvard.edu)
Word count:  2797 words
-------------------------------
To read a print-formatted version of this review, see
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2006/2006-04-04.html
-------------------------------

Andrew Bell's book gets off to an arresting start with the
miscalculated speech by Nicolae Ceaus,escu in Bucharest four days
before his death that revealed his weakness and unleashed the anger of
his subjects. Bell is interested in the self-presentation of political
leaders, and the responses that they elicit from the citizen body. The
ancient sources, as he admits, tell us much more about the former than
about the latter; but from the surviving textual record, unbalanced
though it is, he sets out to reconstruct the way in which the ruler
manipulated his physical presence and paraded his material resources to
impress his subjects in classical Athens, the Hellenistic world, and
Republican Rome. Sometimes the subjects were not impressed; but failure
is just as revealing of intention as success, and one of Bell's
concerns is the extent to which the "ordinary man" in Antiquity
possessed the power to refuse to be over-awed by the spectacle that his
ruler strove so hard to make of himself and his treasures.

The image of Ceaus,escu hovering on his balcony, humiliated by the
jeering audience, introduces theoretical considerations that occupy the