Acknowledgements

This is a book that has taken far longer to write than I ever could have envisaged, and in its course I have incurred many debts to many people.

At the University of Edinburgh I am lucky to have fantastic colleagues in the Classics department but I owe special thanks to Louise Blanke, Niels Gaul, Gavin Kelly, Calum Maciver, Richard Rawles, Ben Russell and Eberhard Sauer for various pieces of assistance and advice. I am also very fortunate in my colleagues in the wider School of History, Classics and Archaeology, especially among the medievalists: Cordelia Beattie, Tom Brown, Zubin Mistry and Rick Sowerby, as well as my corridor mates, Stephen Bowd and Esther Mijers. I would also like to mention the members of the Centre for Late Antique, Islamic and Byzantine Studies and, of course, the many fine students who have studied both late antiquity and popular culture with me over the years.

Outside Edinburgh I am especially grateful to the generosity of Lisa Bailey, David Frankfurter, Simon Loseby and Jeroen Wijnendaele, who read parts of the manuscript and gave excellent advice. Thanks are also due to Cyril Courrier, Guy Halsall, Marc Heijmans, Emanuele Intagliata, Bill Klingshirn, Polly Low, Dunstan Lowe, Julio Magalhães de Oliveira, Tina Sessa and Frédéric Trément, and special gratitude is due to Caroline Nicholson who gave me her personal collection of books on southern Gaul. I continue to find the community of late antique scholars an excellent place to call home but am also appreciative of the early medievalists who are welcoming to an eternal interloper.

Bits of this book have been presented over the years in a variety of settings beyond Edinburgh – Budapest, Cambridge, New Haven, Oxford, São Paulo, St Andrews and Tvärminne – and the ensuing discussions have been very helpful as well as enjoyable.

It is not always easy to write a book about the south of France while based in Scotland. I am very grateful to the wonderfully efficient Interlibrary Loans department at Edinburgh University Library and the ever-patient Hellenic and Roman Library at the Institute of Classical Studies. Thanks too are due to the libraries at the Musée Departmental Arles Antique and at the Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme in Aix-en-Provence.

Funding from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland and from the School of History, Classics and Archaeology supported early phases of the research. Nearly as far back in the mists of time I wrote the larger part of the manuscript thanks to a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for 2016–17. More recently, the School of History, Classics and Archaeology funded expensive image reproduction rights. I am very grateful for this financial support and the help of the Research Office. Thanks too to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Michael Sharp has again been both judicious and extremely patient, including during the long hiatus when I was head of department during a global pandemic and the manuscript was all but forgotten; Katie Idle has been exceedingly helpful, as have all involved. My readers for Cambridge University Press were exceptionally perspicacious, and their comments have greatly improved this text, but I remain entirely responsible for its remaining deficiencies.

Thanks to my family are left until last, but are certainly not least. Alan Grig accompanied me on two memorable research trips to Provence; Mary and Peter Hayes kindly came to stay with the rest of the family while I was gone. My children, Rosa, Clem and Frieda Hayes, at one point claimed to think that I was writing a book on ‘late antique pedants’, but they did like the carousel at Arles. Hamish helpfully sat on every printout available to him. The most important thank you, once more, goes to Damian.