Preface

Summary

A great many people have assisted me in the writing of this book, and I wish to take this opportunity to thank them. Peter Garnsey was an exemplary supervisor of the Ph.D. thesis on which it is based, unfailingly providing encouragement, advice, ideas and obscure pieces of bibliography whenever appropriate; I am also grateful for his continued support since submission. As my examiners, Dominic Rathbone and Jeremy Paterson offered many invaluable suggestions as to how the thesis might best be turned into a book; it is undoubtedly much improved as a result of their comments.

I have benefited greatly from the opinions of people who have read sections of the work or heard versions of it in seminars. I particularly wish to thank John Patterson for his extensive comments and encouragement; Keith Hopkins, for necessary criticism of my grasp of demography and for lending me his unpublished piece on the city of Rome; Wim Jongman, for introducing me to recent work on early modern metropolitan cities and for the loan of another unpublished article.

The bulk of the work of revising the thesis for publication was carried out in the Department of Classics at the University of Wales, Lampeter; I wish to thank everyone there for their help and support, especially Geoff Eatough and Anne Gwilym. I am also very grateful to Pauline Hire at Cambridge University Press for all her encouragement and advice to a first-time author.