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  • From the Editor
  • Ralph W. Mathisen

In this first number of our third volume, we return to the western Roman Empire, beginning with two pieces discussing the significance of the fortification of Roman cities in Gaul during the latter part of the third century CE. These walls once were thought to have been a consequence of the third-century "Imperial Crisis" and "Military Anarchy," but Hendrik Dey and Bernard Bachrach concur that the connection with any such crisis has been overstated. Dey, acknowledging the fundamentally defensive purpose of the walls, focuses rather on political, propaganda, and psychological factors that influenced the construction of ornamental, polychrome walls. Bachrach takes a different tack, and uses an analysis of the tremendous amount of resource expenditure that went into the construction of the walls to suggest that any impact of the "third-century crisis" must have been short-lived and not nearly as devastating as has been thought.

A second "matched set" of studies, by Walter Goffart and Guy Halsall, is presented in a friendly spirit of free and frank academic debate surrounding one of the thorniest and most contentious issues to confront historians of Late Antiquity: the means by which barbarians were settled on Roman territory. Goffart takes the opportunity here to restate and summarize, in concise form, his thesis that barbarians were settled not by being assigned grants of land but by being allocated the tax revenues that accrued from the land. Goffart expands earlier statements of his thesis to include all of the barbarian settlers in the empire, and suggests that grants of tax revenues rather than actual land ownership explains why Roman landowners did not bitterly complain about expropriated land. In the course of his discussion, Goffart challanges some of the conclusions presented in a recent book of Halsall, who responds here to some of Goffart's critical portrayals of his own thesis, which argues that the individual barbarian settlements need to be considered in light of the particular times, places, and circumstances that each took place.

In addition, Mark Handley continues and expands upon the long tradition of providing addenda and corrigenda to the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire with a compilation of no less than 273 entries, including not only many clarissimi, but even the occasional spectabilis, inlustris, and stray praetorian prefect. Nor does this issue completely ignore the east, as it concludes with a piece by Leslie MacCoull on Philoponus and the Coptic eucharist, which permits us to nuance further our understanding of the means by which the Miaphysite church established its own identity in the sixth century. [End Page 1]

We also are pleased to offer an expanded selection of book reviews in this volume, for which special thanks are due to our book review editors Hagith Sivan, Michael Kulikowski, Dennis Trout, and Richard Lim. We hope that presses will continue to forward books for review so that this essential means of keeping in touch with the latest scholarship in the field can be expanded even further. And I would be remiss if I did not conclude with the now customary appeal for our readers to continue not only to submit their scholarship for publication but also to encourage colleagues and libraries to subscribe to JLA (http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_late_antiquity/) [End Page 2]

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