Author’s Epilogue:
Re-drawing the Map?
Introduction
An epilogue must by its nature involve looking back, and this one duly does
so: first to the generous labours of Hannah Cotton and Guy Rogers; then,
briefly, to the evolution of my own work since I began a doctoral thesis on
Cassius Dio under Sir Ronald Syme in ; and finally, and at much great
length, to the ancient world itself, and to the various shapes which the writ-
ing of its history might take on, when viewed from the perspective of the
early twenty-first century.
The first thing is certainly to thank Hannah and Guy, however inade-
quately, for the huge burden of work which they have taken on, at a real cost
to their own interests: negotiation with the publisher, selection of material,
transformation of the style of presentation of older papers to fit the new con-
text (much more laborious than might have been expected), the production
of maps, proof correction, indexing, and so forth. No one could have better
friends than these.
The end product of all these efforts, extending over a number of years, and
taking up three volumes, has a coherence, or shows a progression, which by
its nature is not a representation of the successive chronological stages of my
own work. That began with the first three centuries of the Roman Empire,
in the form of a book on Cassius Dio,^1 on the one hand, and of papers on the
working of the Empire and on Augustus on the other. A piece of pure luck,
in the form of a visit by Jean Bollack to Oxford in , led to an invitation to
write the volume of the Fischer Weltgeschichte on the Empire, a task which
forcibly extended the range of my knowledge both in space and time.^2 In
.A Study of Cassius Dio(; repr. ).
. First published in the Fischer Weltgeschichte series asDas römische Reich und seine
Nachbarn().