Acknowledgments

Many acknowledgments conclude by thanking friends without whose assistance the book would never have been finished. I must begin with the admission that but for certain friends' initiative, this book would never have been started. My first and deepest debt is to the Sather Committee and the Department of Classics of the University of California, Berkeley, who, in inviting me to give the Sather Classical Lectures for 1984/85, made me the kind of offer that, whatever the trepidation it induces, one does not refuse. The invitation came with several years' notice; yet despite some feverish thought over the intervening period about what I should say, I arrived in California in late August 1984 in a state of unpreparedness. It was then that I needed, and received, the unstinting encouragement of friends on all sides, among whom I must single out the chairman of the department, Leslie Threatte, together with Jock Anderson, Crawford Greenewalt, Andrew Stewart, and Ronald Stroud. Presently I was joined by my wife Annemarie, who had just suffered the heaviest of blows in the death of her much-loved mother, Maria Künzl, but who also provided whole-hearted support at a critical stage. The benevolent climate of Berkeley, both literal and figurative, did the rest: the warm hospitality of colleagues in and beyond the Department of Classics and the stimulus given by the students in my

graduate class were constantly inspiriting, and I benefited from the encouragement of lecture and seminar audiences in Santa Cruz, Stanford, San Jose, Davis, Los Angeles, Malibu, and Vancouver and Victoria, B.C. I had also enjoyed a helpful correspondence with Lucia Nixon in Athens, some of whose fruits have materialized in the opening pages of chapter 4; and I would single out the special generosity of Hamish Forbes, Hans-Volkmar Herrmann, and Mervyn Popham, who have allowed me to reproduce here versions of plans not previously published.

To these acknowledgments I must add a sincere expression of gratitude to the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Berlin, and its President, Prof. Dr. Edmund Buchner, whose generous hospitality in the spring of 1985 gave me a precious month of leisure, unavailable in Berkeley and unthinkable in Cambridge, to set about writing a final draft of the book. To all of them, and to many other colleagues in Cambridge, California, Paris, and Berlin with whom I discussed some of the ideas here presented, I owe a debt greater than any that this book could discharge.

A. M. SNODGRASS
CAMBRIDGE,
JUNE 1985