Whether in legal, military, political, or economic matters, there can hardly be a scholar more qualified to venture an opinion, let alone produce a definitive statement, on the situation in the third century CE than Lukas de Blois. In this volume, de Blois has carefully assembled the work of decades into a comprehensive treatment of imperial power in this challenging period, including a new and convincing argument regarding the positive influence of bureaucratization on the imperial system. The monograph is structured around notions of different kinds of power, drawing explicitly from the theoretical framework of Michael Mann.1 It considers, in turn, both the true state, and representation, of imperial power through Mann’s lenses of economic, military, political, and ideological power.