Epilogue
many ways it could be said that I have lived ever since off the material thus
acquired.
At the same time chance played a part in another way. In the sixties the
history of the Jews under the Empire was one of the topics on which I lec-
tured to undergraduates in Oxford. I believe it to be true, rather than a piece
of fictional reconstruction, that it was reading Josephus which led me to
notice that his narrative involved the despatch of a series of embassies to
the Emperor, but did not seem to display the arrival in Judaea of sponta-
neous commands or general orders sent by the Emperor. This was thus, or so
I firmly believe, the origin ofTheEmperorintheRomanWorld, which began as
a planned monograph on embassies to the emperor, and only later expanded
to cover other topics and other forms of communication.
The other direction in which an interest in Josephus led was of course to
contact with Geza Vermes, and the revision of Schürer’sHistory of the Jew-
ish People,^3 the product of a series of step-by-step developments which are
vividly recalled by Geza in his autobiography, appropriately entitledProvi-
dential Accidents.^4 To say that both authors, or editors, had to learn on the job
is a polite way of confessing that we had at the beginning not the faintest idea
of what the task would involve, or on what principles it could be carried out.
When Martin Goodman joined us, however, he seemed to have a complete
grasp of the problems from the beginning.
In the mean time I had moved to University College London in , and
found my new colleagues unanimous in the view that the new professor, in
succeeding Arnaldo Momigliano, should inherit the lecture series covering
Greek history from to ..A rapid immersion in wholly unfamiliar
waters was required. Equally, Roman history, as defined in London, stretched
forward to.., and brought with it, among others, Eusebius, Ammianus
Marcellinus, and Augustine. But, in a way which was even more novel for
me, it also extended back over the whole history of the Roman Republic to
look at the regal period and the legendary origins of the city. Whatever sense
I have of Republican Rome and its institutions, and of Italy in that period,
is owed to my colleagues at UCL, John North and Tim Cornell, but also to
Michael Crawford, and (and in a different sense) to a stay at the British School
in Rome in .
That intellectual debt remains, even if none of those named would agree
with the conception of the power of the Populus Romanus which is explored
in various articles collected in volume ,The Republic and the Augustan Revo-
. Schürer, Vermes, and Millar,History.
. G. Vermes,Providential Accidents: An Autobiography(), chap. .