PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITIONxiithe Islamic period. I am grateful to Geoffrey Greatrex and Shaun Tougher,
the two readers, for their valuable suggestions for expansion and revision. It
was not my intention in the early 1990s to provide an overall narrative account
but rather an accessible analysis of the major areas of interest and importance
in the period. A reliable account is now available in Stephen Mitchell’s History
of the Later Roman Empire, AD 284–641 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), and there
have been other helpful publications, including Philip Rousseau, ed., A Com-
panion to Late Antiquity (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) and Scott Johnson,
ed., Handbook to Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). The
aim of the present book remains that of providing a critical synthesis of the
many key themes which emerge during this extremely important and now
much studied and much debated period.
I wish to thank Matthew Gibbons and Amy Davis-Poynter at Routledge
for their enthusiastic help in making this revised edition possible, and again
my thanks go to Fergus Millar, not only an inimitable series editor but also a
constant inspiration and a very good friend, and to Robert Hoyland for inval-
uable help in the fi nal chapters. Since shortly after the publication of the fi rst
edition I have been based in Oxford, and I should also place on record my
debt to the very lively seminars, lectures and conferences on late antiquity and
Byzantium which have been such a regular feature in these years. Late Antique
Archaeology, the series of edited volumes published by Brill, Leiden, originated
in conferences organized in Oxford by Luke Lavan and Bryan Ward-Perkins,
and the Oxford Centre for Late Antiquity (OCLA) hosts an extraordinar-
ily wide range of events and activity; it has now been joined by the Oxford
Centre for Byzantine Research (OCBR). I must also mention the many
Oxford graduate students, including those I have supervised since 1994, and
my visiting graduate students from Budapest, Münster, Nizhny Novgorod
and Princeton, who have acted as a constant stimulus and who with my senior
colleagues in several different faculties make Oxford such a very rewarding
place. I dedicate this revised edition to them and to all the colleagues and
friends who, by themselves contributing so much to the study of late antiquity
and being so generous with their time and expertise, have done so much to
make my own work possible.
Averil Cameron
Oxford, February, 2011PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITIONxii