Lord of Emperors

ACKNOWLEDCEMENTS

The Sarantine Mosaic is animated by and in part built around a tension in the late classical world between walls and wilderness. For my own introduction to this dialectic (and how it shifts), I am indebted to Simon Schama's magisterial Landscape and Memory. This is also the work that introduced me to the Lithuanian bison and the symbolism surrounding it, giving rise to my own zubir.

The general and particular works cited in Sailing to Sarantium have anchored this second volume as well, and Yeats remains a presiding spirit, in the epigraph and elsewhere.

I should now add Guido Majno's quite wonderful The Helping Hand: Man and Wound in the Ancient World. On Persia and its culture, books by Richard N. Frye and Prudence Oliver Harper were immensely useful. For table matters and manners I was aided by the Wilkins and Hill text and commentary on Archistratus, along with works by Andrew Dalby and Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat. Attitudes to the supernatural are explored in books by Gager, Kieckhefer, and Flint, and in a collection of essays edited by Henry Maguire for the Dumbarton Oaks research facility in Washington, D.C. Dumbarton Oaks also provided translations

of Byzantine military treatises, papers presented at various symposia, and some evocative artifacts in their permanent collection.

On a more personal level, I have been greatly the beneficiary of the skills, friendship, and commitment of John Jarrold, John Douglas, and Scott Sellers, and I am indebted to the careful and sympathetic eye of my copy editor for both volumes of this work, Catherine Marjoribanks. Jennifer Barclay at Westwood Creative Artists has brought intelligence and a necessary sense of irony to increasingly complex foreign language negotiations. Rex Kay, as always, offered early and lucid commentary, especially (but not only) on medical issues.

I also want to record here my appreciation for the encouragement and sustained interest offered by Leonard and Alice Cohen for fifteen years now. Andy Patton has been a source of ideas and support for even longer, and in this case I am particularly indebted to him for discussions about Ravenna and light, and the various doorways (and traps) that must be negotiated when a novelist deals with the visual arts.

There are two others who continue to be at the centre of my world, and so of my work. The usual suspects, one might say, but that flippancy would mask the depth of what I hope to convey. Accordingly, I'll simply conclude here by naming Sybil and Laura, my mother and my wife.