A MEDITERRANEAN EMPIRE 27Diodorus was writing shortly before the great period of expansion under
Augustus. Strabo lived through this period: ‘At the present the Romans are
carrying on a war against the Germans, setting out from the Celtic regions
... and have already glorifi ed the fatherland with some triumphs over them’
(287). Strabo’s words imply that Rome’s mission in the North was essentially
one of conquest rather than the spread of Graeco-Roman civilization.^18 In
another passage the impact of Rome on the way of life of the conquered
barbarians is tacitly recognized: ‘The Romans too took over many nations
that were naturally savage owing to the regions they inhabited, because
those regions were either rocky or without harbours or cold or for some
other reason ill- suited to habitation by any number. Thus they not only
brought into communication with each other peoples who had been isolated,
but also taught the more savage how to live under forms of government’
(127). The approach of the Roman government was essentially pragmatic,
its cultural objectives limited. The frontier peoples were to be tamed,
neutralized and exploited. The exposure of conquered barbarians to a
superior way of life was part of this policy, but a means to that end, not an
end in itself.
Strabo’s cultural prejudice is allied to ignorance. He knew that the
expansion of Rome (rather than the industrious research of geographers)
had signifi cantly increased men’s knowledge of the North (14; 117–18),^19
but did not himself tap these new sources of information. Thus in his
discussion of Gallic geography Strabo seems more interested in scoring off
Pytheas the geographer from Marseilles of the fourth century BC than in
learning from Caesar. One must of course be careful when evaluating
geographers of antiquity to avoid making anachronistic judgments. The
ancients lived with only a partial knowledge even of that part of the world
with which they were familiar. Estimates of the length and breadth of the
Mediterranean and distances within it varied greatly, while Pliny
miscalculated the length of Italy, his home country, by about 400 Roman
miles ( HN 3.43). In antiquity distance was measured in travel- time, which
was far from constant, especially at sea. No one therefore would have been
surprised let alone shocked by Strabo’s apparent lack of interest in seeking
to acquire and pass on precise information, as exemplifi ed in the following
passage: ‘Now a country is well- defi ned when it is possible to defi ne it by
rivers or mountains or sea; and also by a tribe or tribes, by a size of such and
such proportions, and by shape where this is possible. But in every case, in
lieu of a geometric defi nition, a simple and roughly outlined defi nition is
suffi cient. So, as regards a country’s size, it is suffi cient if you state its greatest
length and breadth; and as regards shape, if you liken a country to one of
the geometric fi gures (Sicily for example to a triangle) or to one of the other
well- known fi gures (for instance, Iberia to an oxhide, the Peloponnesos to a
leaf of a plane tree)’ (83). The Roman army imposed a modicum of order by
laying down and measuring out in Roman miles or a local equivalent an
arterial road system, and by building up a body of reasonably accurate