I first met John Oates in the fall semester 1966 at Yale. I was a second-year graduate student, he a junior faculty member just back from a year in England during which his projects included what was to become his famous article “A Rhodian Auction Sale of a Slave Girl” (JEA 55 [1969] 191–210). From the ancient history seminar that he conducted that semester came the ideas that would later be developed in the dissertation I wrote under Bradford Welles’ direction. Unless I am mistaken, and through no merit of my own, but sheer good fortune, I own the distinction of being one of John Oates’ first students and one of Bradford Welles’ last. I was much too green to contribute to the Festschrift in Welles’ honor (Am.Stud.Pap. 1 [1966]), but time passing has made me seasoned enough to contribute to this special GRBS issue for John. It also happened that during his year in England, John had read and reviewed Horst Braunert’s Die Binnenwanderung: Studien zur Sozialgeschichte Ägyptens in der Ptolemaër- und Kaiserzeit. His enthusiasm for Braunert’s book carried over into conversation and obviously made quite an impression on me. Braunert’s concern was the internal migration of people in Egypt as evidenced mainly by the papyri. Massive as the book is, Die Binnenwanderung treats the Byzantine period only relatively briefly toward its conclusion (pp.293–338). So it was that some years later, in the mid-1970s, I gathered evidence meant to flesh out Braunert’s treatment of the Byzantine period. This was deployed in a manuscript “On Egyptian Society in Late Antiquity,” completed in 1978 and earmarked for inclusion in Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt.