Jeannine Diddle Uzzi’s Children in the Visual Arts of the Roman Empire joins an increasingly crowded field of scholarship on ancient childhood, especially that concerned with the theme of its social “construction.” Recent work, from Beryl Rawson’s authoritative Children and Childhood in Roman Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) to Ada Cohen and Jeremy Rutter’s new collection Constructions of Childhood in Ancient Greece and Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), has focused attention on how childhood was recognized and appreciated as a distinct developmental lifestage that, at the same time, was constantly reimagined (especially through art) to meet the needs of different social groups. Uzzi’s work shares an interest in the constructed nature of childhood but is notable for its emphasis on political ideology. For her, the images of Roman and non-Roman children that appear on state monuments distil the elite’s starkly contrasting visions of their futures and thus give access to “fundamental aspects of a Roman imperial ideology, an idea of Romanitas” (1). Uzzi’s volume begins with a brief outline of her theoretical model (chapter 1), which draws heavily upon postcolonial theories of nationhood. This is followed by an extended discussion of the visual evidence and its limits (chapter...