Acknowledgements
The editors wish to thank several people without whose efforts this volume would not exist.
First of all, we are grateful to our contributors not only for their excellent contributions, but also for their patience with the process of transforming a collection of conference papers into the volume before you.
We are also grateful to those made who it possible in March 2017 to organize the conference in Rome where earlier versions of most of the papers included here were first presented. The conference was a cooperative venture between the American Academy in Rome and Sapienza University, and we are grateful to both of those remarkable institutions for their support. Among the leadership and staff of the AAR, we are particularly grateful to Kimberly Bowes, who as Director of the AAR hosted the first day of the conference, and to Anne Coulson, who as Deputy Director for Programs and Administration supervised the actual organization of that day’s work. For organizing the two subsequent days of papers at Sapienza we are similarly grateful to Dr. Francesco Ursini of that university.
We also wish to thank those who participated in the conference either by giving papers that they were not able to contribute to this volume or by chairing sessions. These friends include Andrea Cucchiarelli, Mario Labate, Ellen Oliensis, Bettina Reitz-Joosse, and Gianpiero Rosati. The editors and contributors are also indebted to the many in attendance on all three days of the conference who contributed to the many stimulating discussions from which we have all benefited. In addition we wish to acknowledge the valuable advice of the anonymous reader engaged by Brill, and the encouragement of our editor, Mirjam Elbers, and her associate Giulia Moriconi.
Finally, we are grateful to the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Virginia for subventing a portion of the production costs of this volume, and to the Swiss National Science foundation for a generous grant to make it available on an open access basis.