• Covers both mainstream Graeco-Roman religion and regional religious traditions, from Egypt to Western Europe
• Examines the shared assumptions and underlying dynamics that characterized religious life as a whole
• Draws on a wide range of primary material, both textual and visual, from literary works, inscriptions and monuments
• Offers insight into the religious world in which contemporary rabbinic Judaism and Christianity both had their origin

James B. Rives is Kenan Eminent Professor of Classics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of Religion and Authority in Roman Carthage (1995), Tacitus: Germania (1999), and has co-edited Flavius Josephus and Flavian Rome (2005). He has written a number of important articles on Roman religion in the Journal of Roman Studies and Journal of Early Christian Studies, and has taught courses on Jews and Christians in the Roman Empire, religions of the Roman Empire, and ruler cult in the Graeco-Roman world.