known visit to Jerusalem as an adult, exchanged by an indifferent Pilate for a popular bandit chief and executed by a penalty reserved for slaves, brigands, and aliens
of the lowest social status. The contrast between the social milieux of Acts and of the Gospels leaps to the eye at every turn.
It was precisely the achievement of the Roman Empire to have assimilated in one political and administrative system the immense diversities of the Mediterranean,
and much of the northern European, worlds. The Bordeaux pilgrim undertook his journey to the Holy Land to see for himself the historical location of a religion that
was within a few years of the conversion of Constantine (A.D. 312) to provide a coherent ideology for the entire Roman Empire. His near-contemporary, Eusebius
of Caesarea, saw in the pax Augusta the providential dispensation of God to facilitate the expansion of Christianity through the Roman world.
For the power of the Romans [he wrote] came to its zenith at precisely the moment of Jesus' unexpected sojourn among men, at the time when Augustus first
acquired power over all nations, defeating Cleopatra and putting an end to the succession of the Ptolemies. ... From then also the Jewish nation has been subject to
the Romans, that of the Syrians likewise, the Cappadocians and Macedonians, Bithynians and Greeks; to put it briefly, all the nations which now fall under the
Roman Empire. (Demonstratio Evangelid 3.7. 30ff.)
With what difficulty, remarked Eusebius, would the disciples otherwise have travelled to foreign lands, 'the various nations being at war with one another, their
diversities of government preventing relations between them'.
Eusebius' conception, for all its grandeur, fails even to mention the western and northern regions of the Roman Empire. It is not just that, by his time, the Empire
was divided into largely self-contained administrative and political units. The reserved attitude of Greeks towards the West, the Latin language, and its literature,
though modified when, in the fourth century, a Latin-speaking imperial court governed from Constantinople, is a fundamental aspect of ancient cultural history. Not
that they otherwise allowed themselves to be inhibited, for in the republican and early-imperial age the intellectual and human current from east to west massively
exceeded that in the reverse direction. In the three centuries before Eusebius' time, Greeks by the myriad had gone to the west to seek their fortune as artists, writers,
teachers, and exponents of the other diverse skills mentioned by Juvenal: 'grammarian, orator, geometer, painter, wrestling-master, prophet, tightrope walker,
medical man, wizard-he can do anything, your penniless Greek ...' [Satires 3. 76-8). It was of course precisely his 'penniless' state that the humble Greek wished to
remedy in going to Rome, and he had many examples, at the highest levels of distinction, to spur him on; Tiberius' astrologer, the famous mathematician Thrasyllus,
Claudius' doctor Xenophon of Cos and his librarian Ti. Claudius Balbillus of Alexandria, not to mention the cohorts of literary men and scientists found at Rome
under Augustus. In these professions, as Virgil had conceded in a famous passage (Aeneid 6. 847 ff.), Greeks were allowed the supremacy.
Juvenal's attitude to Greeks is usually linked with his notorious allusion to the Orontes pouring into the Tiber, bringing its hordes of Greco-Syrian rhetoricians,
musicians, religious fanatics, and prostitutes, but he goes on in later lines to mention also towns and islands of old Greece and Asia Minor, his examples (Sicyon,
Amydon, Andros, Samos, Tralles, Alabanda) being chosen, no doubt, for their adaptability to hexameter verse and their ability to suggest the sound of Greek speech,
but truly identifying the ancient homelands and colonial area as well as the Hellenized Orient as the origins of the Greeks who made their presence felt in imperial
Rome. From the greater cities of Asia Minor, notably metropolitan centres such as Ephesus, Sardis, and Mytilene, had come ambitious dynasts (hardly 'penniless'
Greeks) of the first and second centuries, to hold senatorial office, the consulship and provincial governorships (thereby refuting the second part of Virgil's
prophecy, reserving for Romans the arts of government and administration). The historian Cassius Dio came from Nicaea in Bithynia. The son of a senator who had
himself become consul and governed the province of Lycia-Pamphylia, Dio was twice consul and in the later 220s, as an old man, rather surprisingly made governor
of Pannonia, a Danubian military province for whose inhabitants and culture he had little understanding or sympathy. A barbarous race, he thought them, their life
enhanced by no liberal arts or any of the things that make an honourable life worth while. They produced only a little poor wine, drank beer, and lived in extreme
cold. Dio wrote this (he claims) from personal observation of conditions among them, having been their governor, but his attitude is in reality as prejudiced as that of
Juvenal towards Greeks, and with as little excuse. It betrays the depth of a Mediterranean man's, and a Greek civilian's, incomprehension of those non-
Mediterranean military provinces of the Empire which, as events would quickly show, were crucial to its survival.
The limits to the cultural unity achieved, or attempted, by the Roman government in its diverse regions and between its social classes, were then palpable-no less so,
perhaps, than those between the Empire at its fringes and the barbarian world beyond; for the frontiers, generally based on rivers, which promote cultural exchange,