It is over sixty years since the office of epistrategos in Roman Egypt was subjected to a detailed examination and in the interverring years a great deal of new papyrological and epigraphic material has come to light. It was my original intention to write a study of the office in this period with, by way of introduction, a brief sketch of the epistrategos in Ptolemaic Egypt. It soon became apparent, however, that a much more fundamental study of the Ptolemaic epistrategos was desirable, which would attempt to answer, or at least to clarify, the various problems connected with the office in...