222 THE ROMAN EMPIRE
Finally, cities and Romanizing urban elites were not everywhere. The
Celtic area, an extensive belt of land from the Iberian peninsula through
France to Germany and Britain, remained under- urbanized. The cities of the
north African provinces were concentrated in the coastal zone and near-
interior, and in inland Mauretania the main unit of organization was the
tribe. In inner Anatolia, Syria or Egypt, the population lived principally in
scattered villages that retained their distinctive, local character.^34 In Syria
Palestina, Jerusalem disappeared under the straight line and right angle of
Hadrian’s Aelia Capitolina, but Galilee, like other rural areas all over the
empire, was allowed to follow a path of separate development.^35
ADDENDUM
J. Elsner and G. Woolf
Roman cultural history has been the focus of intensive research over the past three
decades. It was conventional in the 1980s to think in terms of cultures (Roman,
Greek, local etc.) but it is now much more common to write about cultural activity.
Earlier studies tended to treat identities as pre- existent dispositions that were
revealed by particular choices of ceramic, poetry and so on: it is now more common
to treat identities as created, maintained and modifi ed through cultural action and
interchange.
So rather than writing that ‘the cultural tradition of the Greeks was much too
powerful to be undermined on home ground’, historians now tend to ask why and
how so many works of literature or architecture were associated with Hellenism;
why this badge had such a powerful appeal for so many imperial subjects (and some
rulers); and whose interests the reproduction of Greek cultural forms served, in the
empire and in so many of its cities (Goldhill 2001), reaching well beyond the bounds
of antiquity into the Roman empire’s Byzantine successor (Kaldellis 2007, 2009).
The urban elites of the former Macedonian kingdoms – and those teachers,
performers and artisans who supplied their desires – were clearly among the early
winners, capitalizing on an interest in Greek things displayed by their Roman
conquerors (Ferrary 1988, Habinek 1998, Wallace-Hadrill 2008). Their success in
entrenching and universalizing Greek language and a selection of cultural practices
(the gymnasium but not democracy, rhetoric but not freedom of speech) enticed the
rulers of cities in Asia Minor and Syria, Egypt, Sicily and southern Italy to participate.
Terms like Hellenization, when still employed, have been decentred (Woolf 1994). It
is more common to focus attention on phenomena like the westward spread of
agonistic athletic festivals, the emergence of empire- wide habits of dining, or on the
new codes of masculinity promulgated in rhetorical performance (Caldelli 1997, van
Nijf 2001, Slater 1991, Garnsey 1999, König 2008, Gleason 1995). Identity politics
certainly includes the elaboration and contestation of notions of Greek identity in
works of literature (Swain 1996, Whitmarsh 2001). But cultural action in the cities
of the East, manifested in monuments and festivals, was often more focused on
sustaining local identities, hybridized from Greek myth, Roman history and elements
that belonged to neither (Whitmarsh 2010, Dignas and Smith 2012). In Rome and