Dear Professor O’Donnell,
I am not going to dignify Palmer’s bizarre fulminations about my book with a formal reply. However, for those who realize that the writing of ancient history has advanced slightly beyond the obsessed antiquarians of the eighteenth and nineteenth century parodied by George Eliot and others, I suggest they first read the book and then study reviews, not all universally laudatory but all fair in recent issues of the American Historical Review, the Journal of Roman Studies, Vergilius, Greece and Rome, and Choice. Those are all reviewers who have some idea of how one does modern archaeology and modern social and economic history
Stephen L. Dyson
University at Buffalo