This book had its beginning, I think, on a day early in the second World War when I asked Professor Thomas Walter Manson to recommend a book which would give me a general view of all that was meant by the term ‘Antiochene’. He replied, ‘There isn't such a book’, and then with the twinkle of the eye which endeared him to so many, he added, ‘so you had better write it.’ The present book, thirty-nine years later, is far from being the book which that greatest of scholars may have had in mind, but I have tried to make it one which might have been useful to me in my youth.

I have been fortunate in the generous understanding of my wife; in the scholarship of my friend, Mr J. K. Waddell, who many times saved me from my own ignorance; in my surgeon, Mr Robert Ryall, who gave me that very great gift, time in which to finish what I had begun; and in the constant support of my brother, Professor J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, to whom I dedicate a book which would have been better if I had more often acted on his advice.