Preface
Fergus Millar, Camden Professor of Ancient History in the University of
Oxford, is one of the most influential ancient historians of the twentieth
century.SincethepublicationofAStudyofCassiusDiobyOxfordUniversity
Pressin,Millarhaspublishedeightbooks,includingtwomonumental
studies,The Emperor in the Roman World(Duckworth,)andThe Roman
NearEast,..–..(Harvard,).Thesebookshavetransformedthe
studyofancienthistory.
In his studyof the role of the emperor in the Roman world Millarar-
guedthatthereignofAugustusinauguratedalmostthreecenturiesofrela-
tivelypassiveandinertgovernment,inwhichthecentralpowerpursuedfew
policiesandwaslargelycontenttorespondtopressuresanddemandsfrom
below. After more than twenty years of scholarly reaction,The Emperor in
the Roman Worldis now the dominant scholarly model of how the Roman
Empireworkedinpractice.
Reviewers immediately hailed Millar’s magisterial study of the Roman
Near East as a ‘‘grand book on a grand topic’’ (TLS, April ). In this
grandbook,displayinganunrivaledmasteryofancientliterary,epigraphi-
cal,papyrological,andarchaeologicalsourcesinGreek,Latin,Hebrew,Ara-
maic, and other Semitic languages, Millar made the indigenous peoples of
the Roman Near East, especially the Jews, central to our understanding of
howandwhythethreegreatreligionsofthebook,RabbinicJudaism,Chris-
tianity, and Islam, evolved in a cultural context that was neither ‘‘eastern’’
nor‘‘western.’’TherecanbenodoubtthatThe Roman Near East ..–..
willbethestandardworkonthesubjectforalongtimetocome.
Morerecently,Millarhaschallengedwidelyheldnotionsaboutthesup-
posedoligarchicpoliticalcharacteroftheRomanRepublicinThe Crowd in
Rome in the Late Republic(Michigan, ). In the future, Millar intends to
returntotheRomanNearEastforanotherlarge-scalestudy,tobeentitled
Society and Religion in the Roman Near East from Constantine to Mahomet.Inthis
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