SYRIA FROM POMPEY TO SEVERUS; A. Gebhardt: Imperiale Politik und provinziale Entwicklung. Untersuchungen zum Verhältnis von Kaiser, Heer und Städten im Syrien der vorseverischen Zeit. (Klio Beihefte, Neue Folge, 4.) Pp. 413. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002. Cased, EUR69.80. ISBN: 3-05-003680-X

The introduction, in which Gebhardt emphasizes the relative paucity of sources for The Classical Review vol. 54 no. 2 The Classical Association 2004; all rights reserved 505 Syria and appropriate modern corpora in comparison with the Anatolian provinces, and concise considerations about topographical and climatic conditions, is followed by a long chapter that leads the reader through the Genese (p. 21) of the rst Near Eastern province until Trajans incorporation of the Nabataean kingdom in the empire as provincia Arabia. G. draws attention to the military character of Syria in the rst 170 years of its existence as a Roman province, to the stagnation concerning security politics until the reign of Vespasian, and to the Flavian eorts to limit the need to put trust in diplomatic relations with more or less independent client kingdoms (cf. my paper The Near East in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods between Local, Regional and Supra-regional Approaches, SCI 22 [2003], 28395, esp. 28992) and the resulting termination of Syrias functioning as a bridgehead. Due to its geographical situation, the caravan citys fortune was to a very large degree dependent on the supra-regional state of aairs between the Roman and Parthian empires, and it is clear that Palmyra owed its main era of peaceful prosperity, best expressed in a manifest concentration of inscriptions referring to long-distance trade in the rst half of the second century, to a Stabilisierung der politischen Verhltnisse in Mesopotamien (p. 301). While the slightly earlier published study by N. Pollard, Soldiers, Cities, and Civilians in Roman Syria (Ann Arbor, 2000), which looks in some detail at the nature of cultural, social, and economic relations between soldiers of the imperial army and civilians not only in Syria, but also in Mesopotamia and Osrhoene, is more interested in so-called organic themes, G.s attention goes to a substantial part of the imperial spine, and as such his book provides numerous building blocks for further studies of all aspects of the Near East in the Classical period.