Preface
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 of A Study of Cassius Dio by Oxford University Press in , Millar has published ten books, including two monumental studies, The Emperor in the Roman World (Duckworth, ) and The Roman Near East, ..–.. (Harvard, ).These books have transformed 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 policies and was largelycontent to respond to pressures and demands from below. After nearly thirty years of scholarly reaction, The Emperor in the RomanWorld 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 Roman 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 ‘‘western .’’ There can be no doubt that The 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, ) and The 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 vii viii Preface held notions about the supposed oligarchic political character of the Roman Republic. Most recently, based upon the Sather Lectures of Millar now has produced his first work centrally focused upon late antiquity, A Greek Roman Empire: Power, Belief and Reason under Theodosius II, –. In the future Millar intends to return to the Roman Near East, for a study to be entitled Society and Religion in the Roman Near East from Constantine to Mahomet. In this study Millar will bring the story of Greco-Roman culture in the Near East from the early fourth century up to the Islamic invasions of the seventh century .. Apparently, the enormous task of writing a social history of the Near East from Alexander to Mahomet will not be left completely to someone else after all, as Millar prophesied in (The Roman Near East, pp. xii–xiii). During the same period when he has produced these ground-breaking books, Millar also has published more than seventy essays on aspects of Greco-Roman history, from the Hellenistic period until the middle of the fifth century .. These essays have laid the foundations for or supplemented the ideas and arguments presented in Millar’s very well known books. Some of these essays, such as ‘‘The Emperor, the Senate and the Provinces’’ ( Journal of Roman Studies []: –), or ‘‘Emperors, Frontiers and Foreign Relations, ..–.. ’’ (Britannia []: –), have appeared in hitherto accessible journals and are widely regarded as classics of scholarship . But other outstanding essays, such as Millar’s study ‘‘Polybius between Greece and Rome’’ (published in Greek Connections: Essays on Culture and Diplomacy [], –), have been more difficult to locate, even for professional historians doing research in the field. Therefore, the primary goal of our collection, Rome, the Greek World, and the East, is to bring together into three volumes the most significant of Millar ’s essays published since for the widest audience possible. The collection includes many articles that clearly will be of great intellectual interest and pedagogical use to scholars doing research and teaching in the different fields of the volume headings: Volume , The Roman Republic and the Augustan Revolution; Volume , Government, Society, and Culture in the Roman Empire; and Volume , The Greek World, the Jews, and the East. At the same time, we have conceived and organized the three volumes of Rome, the Greek World, and the East especially in order to make Millar’s most significant articles readily available to a new generation of students, who increasingly may not have access to the specialty journals or edited volumes in which many of...
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