This book should be sub-titled ‘travelling hopefully’. Its route has been planned in the light of long-standing preoccupations of my own, with some help from friends. The Theodosian Code has long been used as evidence for late Roman history, without much attention being granted, at least by historians writing in English, to the status of that evidence. The conference on the Theodosian Code held at the University of St Andrews in 1990 and the resulting publication, edited by myself and Ian Wood, were a start in that direction. This book takes some points further, in particular in relation to how imperial law was made, and how and whether it worked as intended. This enquiry will entail a re-examination of what we are to make of the rhetoric of the laws: if a certain scepticism over government pronouncements is in order now, there can surely be a case made for subjecting imperial legal propaganda and its motives to similar scrutiny. But we should not focus only on the centre, where imperial law originated; its reception and use by the citizens of the wider Empire is of equal importance. Two perspectives must, therefore, be used, that of the legislator, and that of those who used the law for their own purposes.

In order to arrive at the end of this journey at all, many attractive by-ways have been, regretfully, ignored. I have nothing to say about ‘vulgar law’ – except that the concept requires a re-examination I shall not attempt.