Sviatoslav Dmitriev (Ph.D. Harvard) is an Associate Professor of History at Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana. He has published articles on ancient Greek, Roman, and Byzantine history and authored books on city administration in ancient Asia Minor, the Roman appropriation of Greek political vocabulary, kinship relations in archaic and classical Athens, and the ways in which ancient and Byzantine rhetorical education has distorted our vision of classical Greece. His current book project, provisionally titled The World of John Lydus: Constructing Identity in Early Byzantium, delineates how John Lydus and his fellow-intellectuals reinterpreted the past to accommodate sixth-century Byzantium's conflicting identities.