In writing this book, I have benefitted greatly from the support of institutions, colleagues, friends, research assistants, editors, and family. I have been lucky to have such fine and supportive colleagues in the Department of Classics at the University of Colorado Boulder. I owe special thanks to Noel Lenski – now at Yale – and to John Gibert for their advice and conversation, and for sharing some of their work with me pre-publication – and to Cathy Cameron in the Department of Anthropology, who did the same. My treatment of Epictetus and slavery owes a great deal to an honors thesis that my student, Angela Funk, wrote on that topic. The University of Colorado has supported my research and my writing with a LEAP grant for associate professors, a sabbatical, a fellowship from the Center for the Humanities and the Arts, and a College Scholar Award. I am also most grateful for the hard work of several graduate research assistants: the meticulous efforts of Stephanie Krause and Wesley Wood contributed a great deal to tightening the manuscript up for publication; they also drafted the maps; David Kear’s long experience as an editor greatly improved the first half of the manuscript. John Nebel generously allowed me to use a photo of his own EID MAR denarius and arranged the permission from Gorny & Mosch for the image of the Manius Aquillius denarius.
I also owe thanks to several skillful and meticulous editors from Wiley-Blackwell: Haze Humbert first suggested the idea for this book and supervised the project over the years; Deirdre Ilkson edited early drafts of several chapters; and Louise Spencely edited the final manuscript. The two anonymous readers provided constructive criticism as well as many helpful suggestions and improved the manuscript greatly. Sara Forsdyke and David Lewis generously shared some of their forthcoming work with me; I am also indebted to them for valuable discussions of ancient slavery on several occasions. I am immensely grateful to Susan Treggiari for her astute comments and suggestions on several chapters; and to my wife, Mitzi Lee, who read over the material related to her field of expertise, ancient philosophy, and saved me from several missteps there. Of course, I alone am responsible for the mistakes that remain.