Scholars of the late Roman Republic are keenly aware of the role of veterans: as loyal clients of their generals, beneficiaries of forcible land expropriations and intimidating mobs in post-war political spaces. The ancient sources, however, provide little to help us see these veterans as individual agents of history rather than anonymous masses supporting one military dynast or another. Hoping to mitigate that evidentiary difficulty, Mlambo offers a transcultural comparison with the much better documented case of Zimbabwean veterans of the liberation and civil wars of 1965–80, who shared with their Roman counterparts the experiences of civil war, land expropriations and post-war politicisation. M. acknowledges the chronological and geographical distance between his two case studies, but emphasises common humanity and cites, among methodological precedents, MacMullen's 1984 use of interviews with WWII veterans to illuminate social aspects of Roman legionary experience.

M.'s introduction clarifies that his focus is not land expropriation per se, but rather the masculinity of veterans in two historical contexts that featured expropriation, before noting his debt to masculinity studies and practice theory and providing a review of the relevant ancient sources. Here and elsewhere, some readers will find M.'s treatment of the ancient material overly introductory and his treatment of the Zimbabwean material insufficiently introductory, suggesting an assumption of greater familiarity with the Zimbabwean case than the Roman. Ch. 2 acknowledges fundamental differences between the two case studies: e.g. Zimbabwean veterans were dispossessed indigenous people reclaiming land from European colonisers, while the Romans appropriated land confiscated from fellow Italians. Without underplaying the differences, M. argues that there nevertheless existed a ‘Roman “colonial masculinity” in Zimbabwe’ (36ff.), emphasising the occurrence in both cases of veterans driven by the desire for land as reward for service and leaders like Caesar, Octavian and Mugabe willing to satisfy that desire in service of their own power.

The heart of the book is an episodic collection of studies in ‘veteran masculinity’; though M. provides basic signposting, much of the work of establishing connections between chapters and sections is left to the reader. Ch. 3 introduces the ‘masculinity of the polis’: Roman and Zimbabwean soldiers alike associated military service and land ownership with an ideal of male citizen power: hence the association (well attested in oral testimony from Zimbabwean veterans) of landlessness with emasculation and the consequent hunger for land on the part of veterans who believed their heroic military service for the state entitled them to benefit from post-war expropriations.

Ch. 4 examines ‘warfare-madness’ of veterans whose wartime intentio and ferocia persisted in post-war expropriations. M. compares ancient examples like Lucan's depiction of savagery in the mutiny of Caesar's veterans at Placentia (5.237ff.) with rich imagery and testimony of Zimbabwean veterans, introduced ‘as aids to re-imagine Caesar's ferocious men’ (98): photos of encounters between farmers and veterans during farm invasions from 2000; interviews with veterans justifying their use of violence in expropriations; lyrics of Zimbabwean veteran songs celebrating ‘the glory of brutality’. The material is certainly thought-provoking, but M. here mostly leaves the comparison to speak for itself, juxtaposing the two cases without explicitly providing further comparative analysis.

Ch. 5 adduces the concepts of homosociality and hegemonic masculinity to show ‘how masculinity functioned as a governing ethos’ among veterans and between veterans and their former commanders (112). Bound by shared experience of wartime violence, veterans established exclusive social cohorts acting collectively to acquire and maintain power. In Zimbabwe, Mugabe's veterans emphasised comradeship and relied on their shared military skills and ‘untouchable’ status as war heroes. The client-armies of Rome's military dynasts gave rise to interdependence between soldier and general and homosocial bonds among veterans who constituted ‘power blocs to negotiate, fight, acquire and protect their privileges and gains’ (121).

Ch. 6, on the ‘politics of the physical bodies of client-army veterans’, examines the practice of violent masculinity through ‘combat motion, appropriation of space and exertion of force in land expropriation’ (134). M. notes the prominence in both societies of references to wounds and scars as evidence of heroic service and, explicitly in the Zimbabwean record, as justification for land rewards, arguing that a ‘culture of masculinity, martial aggression and heroism’ characterised veterans in both contexts (142). Moving beyond farmland, ch. 7 examines the occupation of public spaces by mobs of politicised veterans in spectacles of intimidating ‘martial masculinity’. M. compares the practice of ‘spatial masculinities’ in well-known late-Republican examples like Pompey's amassing of veterans in 59 b.c.e. to ensure passage of Caesar's agrarian legislation with Mugabe's incitement of veterans to secure their land gains and his political dominance.

Scholars of masculinity studies will likely find much of interest here, though M. sometimes pushes the multiplicity of ‘masculinities’ so far that the concept's analytical usefulness weakens. The book might also appeal to scholars interested in similarly transcultural comparative methods, both their promise and their limitations. Scholars of the late Republic might appreciate ways in which the Zimbabwean material enriches hypothetical visualisations of the Roman, as for example when M. puts high-resolution oral and photographic accounts of forcibly expelled Zimbabwean farmers up against the fictional encounter of Virgil's Moeris with an aggressively entitled veteran (Ecl. 9), noting in both cases the humiliation of the dispossessed and the ‘performance of a violent masculinity’ by the dispossessors (146). The comparison also suggests new questions: the voices of Zimbabwean veterans certainly provoke thoughts about what we might hear if we had similar access to voices of individual Roman veterans. M.'s greatest contribution is likely to be his demonstration of the potential fruitfulness of comparing Roman phenomena with similar phenomena in modern Zimbabwe and the encouragement of further experimentation with transcultural comparisons.