Fergus Millar is one of the most influential contemporary historians of
the ancient world. His essays and books, including The Emperor in the
Roman World and The Roman Near East, have enriched our understanding
of the Greco-Roman world in fundamental ways. In his writings Millar has
made the inhabitants of the Roman Empire central to our conception of
how the empire functioned. He also has shown how and why Rabbinic
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam evolved from within the wider cultural
context of the Greco-Roman world.
Opening this collection of sixteen essays is a new contribution by
Millar in which he defends the continuing significance of the study of
Classics and argues for expanding the definition of what constitutes
that field. In this volume he also questions the dominant scholarly
interpretation of politics in the Roman Republic, arguing that the Roman
people, not the Senate, were the sovereign power in Republican Rome. In
so doing he sheds new light on the establishment of a new regime by the
first Roman emperor, Caesar Augustus.