i would like to thank the friends and colleagues who read drafts or talked through ideas at various stages of this project: Edward E. Cohen, Joy Connolly, Taylor Corse, Jennifer Ebbeler, Mary-Kay Gamel, Lisa Rengo George, Alexa Jervis, Amanda Krauss, Kevin Lee, Susan McCready, Jess Miner, Alex Purves, Ralph Rosen, and Keith Sidwell. Some of them may not be aware of how helpful they were. Sheila Murnaghan deserves special thanks for reading through the entire manuscript several times, both during and after her tenure as my dissertation advisor. I would also like to thank the two anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press, who saved me from many errors of fact and judgment. I can say with both stock formulaicness and utter sincerity that any remaining deficiencies are entirely my own.

This project was also supported by a number of institutions. It began life as a dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania. Chapter 4 was written with the assistance of a Women's Studies Summer Research Grant from Arizona State University. I would also like to thank the Department of Classics at Columbia University for making me a Visiting Researcher for the summers of 2001 and 2002, the Department of Classics at Georgetown University for making me a Visiting Researcher for spring–summer 2005, and the Library of Congress for granting me research privileges in the summers of 2003 and 2004. Finally, a research leave from Arizona State University in the spring of 2005 made it possible to finish this book.