Re-drawing the Map? lution, and also inThe Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic() and inThe
Roman Republic in Political Thought(). What might look, following the
structure of the three volumes of collected articles, like a starting point, was
in fact, therefore, an expedition, or excursus, back from the Empire to the
Republic; a fairly long excursus, it is true, covering some fifteen years, but
an excursus all the same. The results are very controversial, but at least have
provoked a lively debate, perceptively surveyed recently by Karl-Joachim
Hölkeskamp.^5 For all that, I remain a conspicuously ‘‘non-Roman’’ histo-
rian of Rome, whose intellectual roots lie in the imperial period and in the
Greek East.
In consequence, it is the papers in volume ,Government, Society, and Cul-
ture in the Roman Empire, which represent my real starting point, or base; and
it is from work on the Empire, and especially its Greek half, that I have ex-
tended my interests, to a small degree, back into the Hellenistic period, and
more particularly to Judaism and Christianity, to the eastern borders of the
Empire, and now to the late Empire. It is these latter linked steps which are
represented in the present volume, the third and last of the series.
The chief product so far of looking eastwards has beenThe Roman Near
East, ..–.., of , while the main result of attempts to gain some
grasp of the late Empire (formidably difficult) is to be the book derived from
the Sather Lectures of ,A Greek Roman Empire: Power and Belief under
Theodosius II (–), due for publication in . I hope, and now believe,
that circumstances will allow an attempt to complete this series with a book
on the late Roman Near East of the fourth to sixth century.
Approaching the Ancient World
This being the trajectory, or the set of (more or less) linked trajectories, which
my work has taken, and this being a moment to look back at the ancient
world as it evolved from (let us say) the Trojan War on the one hand and
Moses in Egypt on the other, as its legendary starting points, to the Islamic
conquest of the seventh century, which I would adopt as the—necessarily
arbitrary—terminal point, it will be worth reflecting for a moment both on
the ancient world itself and on possible ways of writing about it. Since an-
cient historians tend to be of modest disposition, it is perhaps worth stressing
that the period concerned covers two millennia, and is longer that that which
stretches from the seventh century to the present.
. See K.-J. Hölkeskamp,Rekonstruktionen einer Republik: Die politische Kultur des antiken
Rom und die Forschung der letzten Jahrzehnte(Historische Zeitschrift, Beiheft , ).