Using archaeological survey data, this chapter compares the Greek and Roman experience of survival and recovery combining the urban and rural approaches.

My first encounter with Anthony was in 1973 and the circumstances of our friendship and subsequent collaboration were entirely in keeping with his delightfully unorthodox approach to life. He was Assistant Director on the Menelaion excavation; I was a PhD student cycling all over the Plain of Sparta to analyse its long-term settlement history against its physical geography. One day quite out of the blue he said to me: ‘I've always wanted to bathe naked in the River Eurotas like the Spartans, are you game?’ So in the siesta in mid-summer down we went, stripped off and entered the river. Actually it was hardly 6 inches deep so we had to lie flat even to get a mild feeling of actually being in the river, all the while trying to avoid a series of unpleasant-looking pieces of white paper flowing downstream from Sparta town. Soon a group of local women appeared and we beat a hasty retreat. And after this male-bonding event, not much later Anthony suggested we start our own project, somewhere rather free of competition yet with a rich prehistory and history. So 1978 with Annemarie as part of a trio, we toured Boeotia and visited almost all the known significant sites (Fig. 20.2).

The Boeotia Project (Fig. 20.3) was intended to be a ten-year enterprise, but in fact our joint fieldwork in surface survey only stopped in the mid-1990s, by which time we had surveyed the urban sites of Thespiai, Haliartos and Askra, as well as Hyettos and large areas of their dependent countrysides (Fig. 20.4). Since that time Anthony has been busy virtually every year assisting me with the study of the finds (Fig. 20.5) and with preparation for the final monographs of the project, and most recently (Fig. 20.6), as always with Annemarie, revisiting sites found by us long ago to evaluate their alteration with time and put them into a GPS-correct location. At the end of the 1990s I moved to Leiden and was obliged to train Classical Archaeology students in the field; this led to our adding the urban survey of Tanagra and Koroneia with parts of their countryside (Fig. 20.7) to our windows into Boeotian long-term settlement history.

Over the course of his long and illustrious career as Lecturer, Reader and Professor in Edinburgh University (1961–76), Lawrence Professor of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge (1976–2001) and currently Fellow of the McDonald Institute of Archaeology at Cambridge, Anthony Snodgrass has influenced and been associated with a long series of eminent Classical linguists, historians and archaeologists.

In November 2014 a special conference took place in Magdelene College, Cambridge to celebrate Anthony's eightieth birthday. Out of this meeting two edited Festschrift volumes have been prepared. The first provides articles written for Anthony by his former students. That will appear under the editorship of Lisa Nevett and James Whitley as a monograph of the McDonald Institute at Cambridge: An Age of Experiment: Classical Archaeology Transformed (1976–2014).

In acknowledgement of his immense academic achievement this second volume offers special papers contributed by friends and colleagues reflecting his wide-ranging research interests: Greek prehistory, the Greek Iron Age and Archaic era, Greek texts and archaeology, Classical art history, societies on the fringes of the Greek and Roman world, and regional field survey.

The intellectual circle of a great senior academic is reflected in this collection of essays that bring fresh insights into the history, art and archaeology of the ancient Greek and Roman Worlds.