Preface
Fergus Millar, Camden Professor of Ancient History in the University of
Oxford emeritus, is one of the most influential ancient historians of the
twentieth century. Since the publication ofA Studyof Cassius Dioby Oxford
University Press in , Millar has published ten books, including two
monumental studies,The Emperor in the RomanWorld(Duckworth, ) and
TheRomanNearEast,..–..(Harvard, ). These books have trans-
formed the study of ancient history.
In his study of the role of the emperor in the Roman World Millar argued
that the reign of Augustus inaugurated almost three centuries of relatively
passive and inert government, in which the central power pursued few poli-
cies and was largely content to respond to pressures and demands from below.
After nearly thirty years of scholarly reaction,TheEmperorintheRomanWorld
is now the dominant scholarly model of how the Roman Empire worked in
practice.
Reviewers immediately hailed Millar’s magisterial study of the Roman
Near East as a ‘‘grand book on a grand topic’’ (TLS, April ). In this
grand book, displaying an unrivaled mastery of ancient literary, epigraphic,
papyrological, and archaeological sources in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic,
and other Semitic languages, Millar made the indigenous peoples of the Ro-
man Near East, especially the Jews, central to our understanding of how and
why the three great religions of the book, Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam, evolved in a cultural context that was neither ‘‘eastern’’ nor ‘‘west-
ern.’’ There can be no doubt thatThe Roman Near East, ..–..will
be the standard work on the subject for a long time to come.
Over the past few years, Millar has published two books,The Crowd in
Rome in the Late Republic(Michigan, ) andThe Roman Republic in Political
Thought(New England, ) on the politics of the Roman Republic and how
those politics have been understood or misunderstood by political thinkers
from the ancient world to the present. These books have challenged widely
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