My book Demography and Roman Society appeared in 1992. Most of the writing of it actually took place in 1987, in my second year as a DPhil student at Oxford. The topic of my dissertation was age and the aged in the Roman world, supervised by Fergus Millar. It had become clear to me in my first year that the very basic question ‘how many old people were there in the Roman world?’ was not one for which anything approaching a ready answer was available. In my second year at Oxford I was fortunate to be able to attend classes in the methods of demography offered by David Coleman and Richard Smith. I also read a great deal, including Wrigley and Schofield’s magisterial work (1981) on the population history of England, as well as Hollingsworth’s 1969 introduction to historical demography. I then sat down and wrote what I thought would be a chapter of my dissertation. By the end of that academic year, it was very clear that the chapter had become too big and it began to take on a life of its own; thanks to Dr Lori-Ann Touchette, one of my contemporaries at St John’s College, Oxford, an American publisher became interested in my manuscript. Hence, in the year that I submitted my dissertation on old age, my demography book appeared with Johns Hopkins University Press, in its Ancient History and Society series.