28 THE ROMAN EMPIRE
information on particular localities. But outside the military, confusion
reigned and was tolerated.
In Strabo’s case the ignorance, which most men shared, of the basic
geography of non-Mediterranean Europe was compounded by lack of
interest, no doubt a by- product of his cultural bias. Strabo accompanied his
patron the prefect of Egypt, Aelius Gallus, on his exploratory voyage down
the Nile, but did not penetrate north (or west) of Italy.
For a provincial’s appreciation of the empire in the golden age of its
development, the middle of the second century AD , it is customary to turn to
Aelius Aristides, the sophist and rhetorician from the town of Hadrianoutherae
inland from Pergamum in Asia Minor. It was Aristides who hailed the
fulfi lment of Claudius’ dream of the orbis Romanus , of Rome as the
communis patria of the world. ‘You have caused the word “Roman” to
belong not to a city, but to be the name of a sort of common race, and this
not one out of all the races, but a balance to all the remaining ones. You do
not now divide the races into Greeks and barbarians... you have divided
people into Romans and non-Romans. Yet no envy walks in your empire.
For you yourselves were the fi rst not to begrudge anything, since you made
everything available to all in common and granted to those who are capable
not to be subjects rather than rulers in turn’ (26.63,65).
The most convincing aspect of Aristides’ oration ‘To Rome’ is its fi rm
Hellenocentricity. Rome’s great achievement in the eyes of the Greek world
and Aristides its representative was to promote a renaissance of Hellenic
urban culture and civilization: ‘Now all the Greek cities fl ourish under you,
and the offerings in them, the arts, all their embellishments bring honour to
you, as an adornment in a suburb’ (26.94). ‘You continually care for the
Greeks as if they were your foster fathers, protecting them, and as it were
resurrecting them, giving freedom and self- rule to the best of them’ (26.96).
The unity of the world under Rome symbolized by the spread of the Roman
citizenship was a secondary consideration. Aristides pays lip- service to the
Roman/non-Roman distinction, slipping back easily into the traditional
division of the world between Greeks and barbarians. Roman citizenship
was only sparsely distributed in the Greek East, even among the provincial
upper classes. In the province of Lycia/Pamphylia in south- west Asia Minor,
fewer than half of about a hundred known holders of the provincial high
priesthood, the highest local offi ce, were Roman citizens before the turn of
the second century AD. Caracalla, the elder son of Septimius Severus, changed
all this by conferring citizenship at a stroke on almost all free inhabitants of
the empire by an edict of AD 212. Meanwhile, Aelius Aristides all but ignored
the non-Mediterranean world. Its existence is acknowledged only by a brief
reference to frontier warfare and the constant reminder of the cultural
cleavage between Greeks and barbarians, whose education at the hands of
the Romans is compared with horse- training (26.70,96).^20
The opinions of Cassius Dio from Nicaea in north- west Asia Minor (not
far from Strabo’s Amaseia near the south Black Sea coast, and even closer to