ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In a survey of this scale, one’s debts are always numerous and often nebulous: practically everyone who’s ever taught you something should have a place, and that kind of list has no limits. So I’ll start by thanking John Davey, who commissioned the volume, Penny Daniel at Profile, and the exceptional teams both there and at Harvard University Press who brought it to fruition. Erin Eckley at Penn State has made it possible for me to do my job and still find moments to write. I am grateful for the research support I’ve received from my university, and for support from the Fund for Historical Studies in the Institute for Advanced Study, where I have spent a happy year as a Member of the School of Historical Studies and where the final draft of this book was completed.

In much broader terms, I’d like to thank those who taught me most of what I know, even though I often didn’t realise I’d learned it until years later – and even though some of them would probably say I haven’t learned a damn thing, least of all from them: Tim Barnes, Palmira Brummett, Jack Cargill, Angelos Chaniotis, Todd Diacon, Martin Dimnik, Jim Fitzgerald, Patrick Geary, Walter Goffart, Maurice Lee, Lester Little, John Magee, Ralph Mathisen, Sandy Murray, Walter Pohl, Roger Reynolds, Danuta Shanzer, Alan Stern, David Tandy and Susan Welch. Also my family, above all my grandmothers, as well as Oliver and Melvin.

Thanks go likewise to friends and colleagues who’ve inspired me, in ways too diverse to parse, and who have little in common save that fact: David Atwill, Bob Bast, Mia Bay, Joe Boone, Kim Bowes, Sebastian Brather, Tom Burman, Craig Davis, Deborah Deliyannis, Bonnie Effros, Hugh Elton, Catherine Higgs, Gavin Kelly, Maura Lafferty, Chris Lawrence, Hartmut Leppin, Mischa Meier, Eric Ramírez-Weaver, Josh Rosenblum, Kathy Salzer, Sebastian Schmidt-Hofner, Tina Shepardson, Denise Solomon, Roland Steinacher, Paul Stephenson, Ellen Stroud, Carol Symes, Philipp von Rummel, Ed Watts, Clay Webster, David Wiljer and Christian Witschel. I owe Nicola Di Cosmo and Michael Maas special thanks for inviting to me to their symposium on ‘Worlds in Motion’ at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2013 (now to be published as Eurasian Empires in Late Antiquity); it opened my eyes to a new and unimaginably rich historical world. To my colleagues in the Penn State history department, as whose head I served during the years I was writing this book, I owe an inexpiable debt, both for tolerating my periodic inattentions and for reminding me, continually and in big ways and small, that structural and social constraints operate on every system of governance. As much as all the foregoing, however, I would like to single out three fellow historians who have influenced my thinking – about history, about our profession, about what we as scholars owe society – so deeply that I’m rarely conscious of their having done so until I find myself unexpectedly reminded, and ever the more grateful, for it. To Richard Burgess, Guy Halsall and Noel Lenski: thanks.

Finally, the book’s dedicatees, better friends than I ever expected to have.