The setting
Contemporaries explained the rise of Rome in terms of the moral character,
political institutions, military talent and good fortune of the Roman people.^1
Writers of the era of Augustus (31 BC – AD 14) adduced also the physical
environment of Rome and Italy. Livy, the historian from Padua, referred to
the central position of Rome in Italy, its serviceable river and not far distant
sea (5.54.4), while Strabo, the historian and geographer from Amaseia near
the southern shore of the Black Sea, spoke of the location of Italy in the
heart of the inhabited world: ‘Further, since it lies intermediate between
the largest races on the one hand and Greece and the best parts of Libya on
the other, it not only is naturally well- suited to hegemony, because it
surpasses the countries that surround it in the valour of its people and in its
size, but it can also easily avail itself of their services because it is close to
them’ (286). Pliny the elder, writing in the mid- fi rst century AD , praised the
productivity of the Italian peninsula as Varro had done a century before
(Varro 1.2; Pliny, HN 37.201–2, 3.39–42).
In the eyes of Strabo these natural advantages were not peculiar to Italy,
but were a possession of the Mediterranean region as a whole: ‘Our interior
sea has a great advantage in all these respects [over the exterior sea]; and so
with it I must begin my description. And far greater in extent here than there
is the known portion, and the temperate portion and the portion inhabited
by well- governed cities and nations. Again, we wish to know about those
parts of the world where tradition places more deeds of action, political
constitutions, arts, and everything else that contributes to practical wisdom;
and these are the places that are under government, or rather under good
government’ (122). In fact for Strabo it was less the Mediterranean as a
whole that possessed signal qualities than the European part of it: ‘But I
shall begin with Europe, because it has contributed most of its own store of
good things to the other continents; for the whole of it is inhabitable with
the exception of a small region that is uninhabited on account of the cold’
2
A Mediterranean empire
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