ABSTRACT
Historians of late antique Rome, as Averil Cameron has pointed out in the introductory essay to this volume, have found China good to think with.1 Rome did not have the phenomenological or historical relations with East Asia that it did with, let us say, Persia or even India, but in this period China (by comparison with other parts of Asia) provides both a wealth of source material and also, reflected in these sources, an idea of ‘Empire’ which invites comparative study.2 In exploring my allotted theme, ‘Converting Environments’, I shall therefore also address issues related to ‘Conversion and the State’; I shall also be dealing with aspects of ‘Conversion and Identity’, since all of these are intrinsically interwoven in the context of historical culture.
