The book arises out of an interest in how a theorised exploration of social identity might be used to shed new light on Roman imperialism and the unequal power relationships at a local level. Typically, the provinces have been approached through the discourse of Romanization, centred around the idea of cultural change. Consequently, most work has concentrated on the evidence for that transformation, exploring the mechanisms through which such changes occurred, and largely dealing with the initial transitional period. Centred around a Roman-native polarity and the reification of Romanitas, this debate has assumed an idealised homogeneity between and within each of the resultant societies after that period of transformation. There has been less work on the variation within communities and the way in which the people of the empire might have experienced Rome after the initial period of annexation. The central question of this book is not ‘becoming Roman’ but rather ‘being Roman’: what it was to be Roman, to live and to interact on a daily level within that society. However, I do not want to present this as a homogenous, monolithic experience. There is a danger that we take our archaeological diagnostics of a ‘Roman’ site, such as glossy red pottery, masonry buildings and coinage, and map them directly onto the people of the past. Instead, by saying that ‘Roman’ has infinite expressions generated through the varying experiences of the individual peoples of the past, the question I wish to ask is how people lived their lives within the Roman period and how this then constructed a multiplicity of Roman identities.