Preface
It is quite a challenge, I have discovered, to write a book that
explains not only what one does, but also how and even why one
does it. That this book should have been written at all, and that
the writing of it was a pleasurable task, should be attributed to
the support of many friends and colleagues. First and foremost,
I am grateful to Richard Stoneman for his invitation to contribute
to the Classical Foundationsseries. In these days when univer-
sity courses empower students to choose from a diverse range of
modular units, and when, as a consequence, university teachers
cannot assume that all students will have had the same basic
training, it seems to me useful that there should be books that
provide students with basic orientation in specific subjects and
their methodologies. Richard is to be commended, therefore, for
taking the initiative in editing a series of books that answers this
need. More than that, I am grateful to him personally for his assis-
tance and encouragement – not to mention his great patience –
at various stages in the thinking through and writing of the
volume, and for feeding me both his own thoughts and those of
other contributors to the series. Also at Routledge, Amy Laurens
and Annamarie Kino have seen the book through the press most
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