Writing about Islam, Gibbon observed how ‘our education in the Greek and Latin schools may have fixed in our minds a standard of exclusive taste’. Contemporary scholars who still stand in that tradition, but are prepared to confront the late antique East, face a challenge of perspective. One thinks of J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz and his threnodies for declining Hellenism. Another notable name is Fergus Millar. His aggressively positivist analyses of material (written and artistic) evidence for ‘the universal presence, and the dominating role, of the Greek language and of Greek culture, both pagan and Christian, throughout the period’ (p. 31) have attracted subtle qualification emphasizing complexity and fluidity (e.g. B. Shaw in Classical Philology 90 [1995], pp. 286–96). In the present volume (three chapters on Greek culture, Jews and Samaritans, Syrians and Saracens) he declares the work of younger scholars (D. Wasserstein, R. Hoyland) ‘seriously misleading’ for misunderstanding how much Greek was ‘the language of ordinary speech’ (p. 21, n. 13: my emphasis). Millar does not in fact analyse ‘ordinary’ speech in this book; nor does he even tackle the wildly fluctuating registers of linguistic competence on display in the epigraphy (oddly, since he urges others to pursue the effect of bilingualism on Syrian Greek). He does, though, invoke at length the Antiochene literary heavyweights—Libanius, John Chrysostom—to reinforce his account of Hellenophone hegemony, though they survive only in manuscripts penned centuries later. A pedantic quibble, of course—unless you go on in chapter 2 to exclude the whole of rabbinic and Samaritan literature from your account of Judaism and Samaritanism for precisely the same reason, and in chapter 3 to privilege the study of Syriac manuscripts because they survive in significant numbers with colophons stating they were made at the time and place in question. Meanwhile the honest reader struggles to quell the thought that an equivalent dossier of inscriptions from seventeenth-century English monuments might be used to argue that educated people in those days all spoke, not dog Latin, but an unbearably pompous Neo-Latin.