Twilight of Empire The Roman Army From The Reign of Diocletian Until The Battle of Adrianople

Greek and Roman history has largely been reconstructed from the works of Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, Tacitus, and other major authors who are today well represented in English translations. But much equally valuable documentary material is buried in inscriptions and papyri and in the works of Greek and Roman grammarians and scholars, and less well known historians and literary figures, of whose writings only isolated quotations have been preserved.

Modern treatments of Rome have projected in highly emotive terms the perceived problems, or the aspirations, of the present: 'race-mixture' has been blamed for the collapse of the Roman empire; more recently, Rome and Roman society have been depicted as 'multicultural'. Moving beyond these and beyond more traditional, juridical approaches to Roman identity, Emma Dench focuses on ancient modes of thinking about selves and relationships with other peoples, including descent-myths, history, and ethnographies. She explores the relative importance of sometimes closely interconnected categories of blood descent, language, culture and clothes, and territoriality. Rome's creation of a distinctive imperial shape is understood in the context of the broader ancient Mediterranean world within which the Romans self-consciously situated themselves, and whose modes of thought they appropriated and transformed.