"Introduction:Patterns and Paradigms in the Ancient Mediterranean Harriet I. Flower Who are you? The question had been at the center of the crisis in African Christianity, as bishops and priests, deacons and lay persons, landowners and tenants, fishermen and moneychangers, craftsmen and civil servants, and itinerant gangs of young men and women mobilized the full panoply of memory, knowledge, and emotion that guided their actions as Christians." Brent Shaw, Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine, p. 771 Perhaps it is only in new Christian values emerging on the sill of Late Antiquity that we might see some of the first tentative steps toward a quality and structure of the future which most Romans of earlier ages apparently did not share. Brent Shaw, Did the Romans Have a Future? p. 22-23 The present volume took its inspiration from an academic conference held at Princeton University in May 2017 to mark the retirement of Professor Brent D. Shaw from the Department of Classics, after a long and distinguished career as a Roman historian, both in Canada and in the US. The conference, entitled Subjects of Empire: Political and Cultural Exchange in Imperial Rome, was very well attended by many from the East Coast and beyond. Over a day and a half colleagues, friends, and former students delivered papers and reminisced about the scholarly inspiration and personal encouragement they had received from Brent Shaw over an academic career that spanned more than 40 years"--