John Bodel is W. Duncan MacMillan II Professor of Classics and Professor of History at Brown University, USA. He studies ancient Roman history and Latin literature and has special interests in epigraphy, slavery in antiquity, Roman religion, funerals and burial customs, writing systems, and the ancient novel. His books include two other co‐edited volumes in Wiley’s Comparative History series: Household and Family Religion in Antiquity (with S. Olyan, 2008) and Highways, Byways, and Road Systems in the Pre‐Modern World (with S. E. Alcock and R. J. Talbert, 2012). Since 1995, he has directed the US Epigraphy Project, which gathers and shares information about ancient Greek and Latin inscriptions in the United States (http://usepigraphy.brown.edu).

Walter Scheidel is the Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Classics and History, and a Kennedy‐Grossman Fellow in Human Biology at Stanford University, USA. He has published widely on ancient social and economic history, premodern demography, and the comparative history of labor and state formation.