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Acknowledgments
The idea of writing a textbook on Roman history began on a long drive from Calgary, Alberta back to Berkeley, California, after attending the Annual Meeting of the Association of Ancient Historians. Fired up by presentations at the conference, two graduate school friends, Judy Gaughan and Beth Severy, and I brainstormed what we might do if we ever decided to write a textbook.
Thankfully this book is not the crazy text that three sleep-deprived students conjured out of the midnight air as we crisscrossed the Pacific Northwest. However, that night did plant the seed, of what parts of the story are often omitted or of how one might try to tell the story of the Roman Republic differently. As I taught courses over the past twenty years, I tried to include as many of those parts as I could, always looking for different ways to tell the story. My courses always involved a significant focus on religion, the family, social structure, arts and letters, and the economy, and I often found myself frustrated that even the new wave of excellent Roman history textbooks did not devote the space I wanted to these topics. When Wiley informed me that they were developing a series of textbooks for the ancient world focused on social and cultural history, I felt I had to say yes, even as I felt there had to be people more qualified than I to write it.
A book such as this does not stand on its own: it rests on the work of many scholars who have written in greater depth on various subjects covered in this book. Indeed, one of the great challenges of this book has been to take brilliant ideas of others expressed in a book of 80 000 words and try to shrink them down to 500 words. Most of these books can be found in the Further Readings section, but I want to acknowledge my debt also to those authors whom space prevented me from listing. I want to express