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Acknowledgements
This work is, admittedly, my first foray as an author into the genre known as popular history. Both as a professor of ancient history and as an avid reader myself, I have become distressed at the relative dearth of popular history available for such an important historical era as the “Middle Empire” period that followed the Crisis of The New Millennium. To be sure, there are plenty of works in both the academic and popular sphere that deal with specific figures and events during the “Middle Empire”, and they are of the utmost quality. I have taken great pains to reference these works at the end of every chapter as their topics are encountered in the book, as a way to provide the reader with direction for further reading if he or she is so inclined. Yet I feel these works are far too specialist for those that fancy themselves a newcomer to the era and do not have much prior knowledge of the era, aside from perhaps the popular TV series Imperator that loosely follows the events of the preceding crisis. It is for those people whom I write this book, in order so that they do not get swamped in the details, and thus give up in despair without being able to fully appreciate the immense importance of this era, and indeed how fascinating it can be.
This book, however, would not have been created without the assistance and inspiration provided by many of my friends and colleagues. In particular, I would like to thank Prof. Julius Narses, who encouraged me to embark on this ambitious project and happily endured my incessant pestering of him about various details and edits, sometimes at the most inconvenient times of day (and night). I would also like to express my gratitude to Prof. Aleksios Sokratis and Prof. Cassius Hermina for taking the time to edit this work, and, in Prof. Aleksios's case, translate this work into the Grecian tongue, allowing it to be accessed by a much larger audience than it otherwise would have in only Latin, and to which I am forever grateful. Finally, I would like to express my thanks to my wife, who has devotedly read through my work as I was writing it, fiendishly applying edits to my grammar and spelling mistakes that I admit occurred frequently during my rough drafts, and to my two sons, to whom this book is dedicated.
None of this could have been done without them, and it is to all of them that I owe this 5 year project's completion to.
~Marcus Cico, University of Carthage Press, September 11th, 2768 AVC