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W hen the Center for Ancient Studies was founded at the University of Pennsylvania in 1996, its guiding mission was to encourage scholars of pre-modern cultures to interact in fruitful ways with each other, without fear of crossing traditional disciplinary, geographical, or methodological boundaries. There will always be plenty of localized research to perform on any given culture, highly contingent upon historical or environmental circumstances, but even within this context, when we encounter the most fundamental questions of humanity, we often find ourselves craving comparative data. This is especially the case when we are confronted with phenomena that seem at odds with the sensibilities of our own era, for it is often comparanda from other fields that enable us to decide whether such phenomena are indeed idiosyncratic to a given culture or whether we simply can find no analogues for them in our own. The comparative approach is a powerful inducement for us to rethink the ways in which we reconstruct and conceptualize the individual cultures of antiquity and pre-modernity and the ways in which we study them.