26 THE ROMAN EMPIRE
penetration of urban civilization.) Strabo presents a picture of Europe as a
continent in which plain and mountain coexist, the inhabitants of the plain
preserving a dominant role with the aid of the political authorities: ‘The
whole of it is diversifi ed with plains and mountains, so that throughout its
entire extent the agricultural and civilized element dwells side by side with
the war- like element; but of the two elements the one that is peace- loving is
more numerous and therefore keeps control over the whole body; and the
leading nations too – formerly the Greeks and later the Macedonians and
the Romans – have taken hold and helped’ (127).
Elsewhere we are told how the Romans ‘helped’ not just by taming the
wild men of the hills, but by bringing them down to the valleys and
converting them into sedentary farmers. Thus, when the Romans extended
their advance into the interior Iberian peninsula in the reign of Augustus, the
symbol of their success was held to be the abandonment by the conquered
tribes of their hill- top refuges and their resettlement as communities of
farmers in the plain, preferably within the territory and juridical and fi scal
control of an urban centre. The strategy was apparently successful among
the Turdetani of Baetica, the southern Spanish province (151), less so among
the Lusitani and the northern tribes, who after the conquest still lived on
goat’s milk, ate acorn- bread for two- thirds of the year, drank beer not wine,
used butter not olive oil, and exchanged by barter (154). Strabo was aware
that goods were exchanged between mountain and plain, that for example
the Ligurians brought down to Genua fl ocks, hides, honey and timber and
took back olive oil and wine (they drank for preference milk and a beverage
made of barley). But it was his conviction that the mountain peoples were
forced into such exchange relationships by the poverty of their own territory,
and that their natural instinct was to plunder (202). Throughout antiquity
mountains preserved their reputation among the cultured urban elite as the
haunt of the brigand, the barbarian and the savage, man and beast.
Besides the mountain – and in the south the desert, whose nomadic
inhabitants ‘are driven by poverty and by wretched soil or climate to resort to
their kind of life... being more often root- eaters than meat- eaters, and using
milk and cheese for food’ (833 cf. 839) – the north of Europe removed from
the Mediterranean was condemned as uncivilized. The comment of Diodorus
the Sicilian on the Celts of Gaul is typical: ‘Since temperateness of climate is
destroyed by the excessive cold, the land produces neither wine nor oil, and as
a consequence those Gauls who are deprived of these fruits make a drink out
of barley which they call zythos or beer, and they also drink the water with
which they cleanse their honeycombs. The Gauls are exceedingly addicted to
the use of wine and fi ll themselves with the wine brought into their country
by merchants, drinking it unmixed, and since they partake of this drink
without moderation by reason of their craving for it, when they are drunken
they fall into a stupor or a state of madness. Consequently, many of the Italian
traders, induced by the love of money that characterizes them, believe that the
love of wine of these Gauls is their own godsend’ (5.26.2–3).^17