If this book had been commissioned in the late eighties as opposed to the latenineties, it would have had a very different shape. Fifteen years ago, historians ofthe Roman world were in the process of dismantling the hierarchical structure of theirsubject that had endured since the beginning of scholarly discourse about the RomanEmpire. In the late sixties and early seventies, scholars began to move away from workconcentrating on the dominant social and political group that had produced the bulkof the surviving literature. They were experimenting with the possibility that groupssuch as women, slaves, children, peasants, the urban poor, and even soldiers mighthave a history that was not dictated solely by the interests of people like the youngerPliny. Work by archaeologists, epigraphists and papyrologists had begun to show howit was possible to recover voices from outside the literary tradition. Even within thetraditional, philological core of the subject there were signs of change. It was inthe late sixties that lively debate erupted over the nature of the Greek literature ofthe Roman Empire. Characters like Galen, Aelius Aristides, and Pausanias becameworthy subjects of research as excavation and epigraphic discovery restored the citiesin which they had lived and worked. In the late seventies biographical approaches toRoman emperors encountered a massive challenge in Fergus Millar’s Emperor in theRoman World, which proposed, for the first time, a model for the interactionbetween emperor and subject that transcended the personalities of individual rulers(Millar 1977). At roughly the same time, two other developments were changing thescope of the subject. One was the growth of interest in ‘‘Late Antiquity,’’ whichfueled interest in broad areas of social and intellectual history. The other was MosesFinley’s work on the economy of the ancient world. His work became the focal pointof a debate between archaeologists who studied the evidence for trade and historianswho questioned whether any amount of empirical data could overthrow an approachbased on a theoretical model.