The Journey of Theophanes: Travel, Business, and Daily Life in the Roman East.

From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - Overall very good and clean. - Preface: It is many years since, in the early stages of my graduate work in later Roman history, I first encountered Theophanes of Hermopolis. I read about him in the pages of a typically enterprising article by Ramsay MacMullen on imperial bureaucrats in the Roman provinces, from which I followed through the reference to C. H. Roberts�s publication of Theophanes� family and business papers in the collection of Greek and Latin Papyri held by the John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester. What I found was an extensive collection of memoranda about travel, living costs, and diet relating to the journey Theophanes made from Hermopolis to Antioch and back that is the subject of this book. For all its evident interest, the material was dense and not very inviting; it did not speak from the living page and, in the more austere learned traditions of those days and despite the fact that its vocabulary lay outside the familiar boundaries of Classical Greek, it offered no translation and little commentary. As time went on I often looked at Theophanes� journey with the idea of making it better known but did not do so with really serious intent until much later, in the midst of other preoccupations and duties that always seemed to claim first place. The core of the book is a translation of the Greek text of the travel memoranda preserved in the Theophanes archive. - IN THE EARLY FOURTH CENTURY, a lawyer and public figure from the Nile valley city of Hermopolis made a six-month business-related journey to Antioch. The day-to-day details are preserved on papyrus documents and offer a remarkable record of this journey, covering everything from distances traveled to daily food purchases, from medicinal supplies to fees paid for services. In this book, the classicist and historian John Matthews translates these important documents and places them in the wider context of the social history of the Graeco-Roman world. The memoranda relating to Theophanes� journey are presented within a historical narrative that offers an array of revelations on diet, travel, social relations, and other fascinating topics. This book creates an unprecedented account of daily life in the years preceding Emperor Constantine�s rise to power in the eastern provinces of the Roman empire. - John Matthews is John M. Schiff Professor of Classics and History, Yale University, and the author of Laying Down the Law: A Study of the Theodosian Code, published by Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300108989