For a variety of reasons this volume has taken longer to write than it should have, and I am grateful to the series editors Paul Cartledge and Peter Garnsey, and to Michael Sharp at Cambridge University Press, for patiently awaiting the manuscript. Many of the individual case studies included here represent the result of long engagement with the material on which they are based. In the process, several potential chapters have eventually been excluded and will appear elsewhere. I hope that the sometimes lengthy history of those that remain has helped to make this a better book: I originally presented Chapter 2 as part of a series of seminars on Archaic Greece at Lincoln College, Oxford in 2001 and, in summary form, at a symposium in honour of Anthony Snodgrass held in Cambridge in the same year. Chapter 3 began as a Classical Archaeology seminar paper given in Cambridge in 2001 and a Classical Studies Department seminar paper given at the Open University in 2002; elements of my argument were also presented in summary form at the Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in 2005. An overview of the material included in Chapter 4 was given at the meeting of the Classical Association of the Mid-West and South in Madison in 2005. My work on the Pompeian evidence, discussed in Chapter 5, was presented to the Classics Department at the University of Cincinnati in 2006 and to the Archaeology Department at the University of Groningen in the same year.