OSWYN MURRAY was born in 1937 and educated at Marlborough College and Exeter College, Oxford. He was Junior Research Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford (1962-7) and Senior Research Fellow in the Classical Tradition at the Warburg Institute, London (1967-8). Since 1968 he has been Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at Balliol College, Oxford. He has held visiting professorships at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris, the British School at Rome, and Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania. He is an editor of The Oxford History of the Classical World (Oxford, 1986), and of a number of other books, notably Sympotica: a Symposium on the Symposion (Oxford, 1990) and, with Simon Price, The Greek City from Homer to Alexander (Oxford, 1990).