By the second century CE, the Roman imperial system was well and truly entrenched across the Mediterranean. Although the empire was never free of conflict and discontent, much of it had enjoyed an extended period of relative stability and prosperity under Roman rule, which in many areas now stretched back two centuries or more. The so-called Pax Romana enabled many of its inhabitants, at least those who were not enslaved and had access to sufficient financial resources, to travel safely and freely across its vast territory, and its various cities consequently became ever more interconnected and internationalised. Rome and Italy remained the notional centre of the empire, but their significance in both the ideology and practical functioning of the empire underwent a gradual but inexorable decline, and, correspondingly, the ways in which elite Roman citizens conceived of their empire began to subtly shift from a model structured on a centre–periphery basis to a more complex decentralised spatial network.
‘Roman’ became an identity category ever more divorced from the city to which it originally referred and available to ever larger numbers of people across the Mediterranean, and the ranks of the imperial administration became increasingly diverse in terms of their geographical origins.Footnote 1 By the beginning of the second century, Rome had in Trajan its first emperor who was born outside Italy. At the same time, the highest levels of the Roman government were beginning to operate on a more itinerant basis, with the emperor spending less and less time in the city of Rome. The business of government was carried out by individuals dispersed across a huge physical space, supported by a remarkably sophisticated imperial postal operation that enabled local officials to engage in regular correspondence with the emperor and his court.Footnote 2 Already at the start of the second century, the emperor had begun to function, in Millar’s memorable words, as a ‘sort of moving capital of the empire in his own person’.Footnote 3 By the third century, such an understanding of the empire had taken hold among the Roman elite to the extent that the historian Herodian could portray one of Commodus’ advisers declaring to him, in the context of a narrative set in 180, that ‘Rome is wherever the emperor is’ (ἐκεῖ τε ἡ Ῥώμη, ὅπου ποτ’ ἂν ὁ βασιλεὺς ᾖ, 1.6.5).Footnote 4
In the second century, the spatial configuration of the empire in the realms of both culture and politics, where for so long the capital city had been constructed as the centre of everything, was gradually giving way to a radically different, decentralised model of understanding. This was not merely a reconfiguration of an existing framework, but the development of an entirely new conception of space, in which the capital city was replaced by the immense and amorphous territorial scope of the empire as the central concept structuring the relationships between different places. Despite these changes, the city of Rome remained the most important cultural and commercial centre in the Mediterranean.Footnote 5 The city retained a symbolic importance as the supposed centre of the world, even as its practical significance for the governance of the empire had diminished substantially, and it was still a major focus of intellectual activity in both Greek and Latin. Even so, over the course of the second century it becomes less and less tenable to think of even Latin literary culture as centred exclusively in the city itself, as reading audiences and patrons in the provinces become increasingly important.Footnote 6 These processes of change, during which multiple, contradictory models of understanding the empire coexisted in tension with each other, did not go unnoticed by the empire’s orators, poets, and philosophers, who in their texts engaged with the homogenising effects of Roman rule on both the capital city and the provinces.Footnote 7
In Said’s insightful analysis of the spatial politics of the European imperialism of the modern period as expressed in English-language novels, spatial differentiation is key to the imperial mindset: it is precisely the fact that there is a ‘here’ that is the European centre of empire and a ‘there’ which is supposedly deserving of European domination that justifies the operation of the imperial system.Footnote 8 In other words, there is a strongly marked perceptual distinction between centre and periphery, to utilise a related conceptual apparatus, as influentially developed in the world-systems theory of Wallerstein.Footnote 9 Such an analysis arguably holds for the first century of the Roman empire, where the inhabitants of Italy and Rome are able to imagine themselves as the central ‘here’ in control of the ‘there’ that is the provincial periphery, but it gradually gives way to an entirely different understanding of empire, in which ‘here’ grows ever bigger, to the point where the only ‘there’ left became the ‘barbarian’ peoples beyond the limits of the empire. The empire as a whole became dominant in people’s understanding of civic belonging, its notional centre correspondingly becoming much less central in people’s mental maps of the empire. When Caracalla – himself born in Gaul to a North African father and a Syrian mother – declared in 212 that all the empire’s free male inhabitants were now Roman citizens, he formalised a near-total decoupling of Romanness from the city to which that designation originally referred, which had been developing for over a century.Footnote 10
In this article I explore the creative responses of two second-century authors to these developments, and in particular how their divergent depictions of the same phenomena might be understood as reflections of their different positions within the literary, political, and social landscape of the empire, even as they are both committed to the maintenance of Roman power. Although they worked in distinct generic, linguistic, and cultural contexts, the Latin satirist Juvenal and the Greek orator Aelius Aristides participated in a shared elite milieu that was becoming ever more diverse and dispersed, and both thematise the homogenisation of space that Roman rule was bringing about. Both writers perceive that Rome was rendering the Mediterranean relatively more undifferentiated, as an internationalised cultural and political idiom became entrenched throughout its territory. One of the more significant implications of this spread of Roman influence across the empire was that it had reduced the distinctiveness of Rome itself by comparison to other cities. For Juvenal, this development is indicative of the moral decline of the city of Rome, which can no longer lay claim to the unique virtues which enable and justify its control over the oikoumene, while for Aristides, it testifies to the beneficial effects of Roman hegemony, which has allowed for prosperity and opportunity to be spread across a vast territory.
These sharply polarised accounts of the homogenisation of Roman space in part reflect the different generic stances of Juvenal’s satire and Aristides’ panegyric, but they can also be understood as embodying, respectively, the divergent perspectives of the Latinate elites of Italy, for whom the decline in Rome’s distinctiveness represented a threat to their own status within the empire, and the Greek-speaking elites of the eastern empire, who, although in some sense members of a conquered population, were newly able to access opportunities within the Roman imperial administration precisely because Rome itself was no longer quite so central in the ideology and operation of the empire. These writers give us a glimpse into the profound changes that relatively stable and long-standing internationalised systems like the Roman empire can make to the construction of spatial hierarchies, and the consequent effects that these changes have upon the ways that the people participating in them experience the world.
I build here upon recent work on both Juvenal and Aristides that has separately elucidated each author’s response to the changing geographical and cultural world of the second century.Footnote 11 In considering this pair of authors together, however, I draw attention to how their particular perspectives on the issue of the homogenising effects of Roman rule are embedded in their respective geographical, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds, while also emphasising their shared belonging to an internationalised milieu. Such a comparative approach allows us to better situate the distinctive features of each author’s perspective against the shared backdrop of Roman elite culture, and in this respect it is intended to contribute to efforts to think about the Roman empire in a more holistic way that recognises that the empire’s Greek and Latin authors inhabited the same world. In other words, my analysis will elucidate what unites the elite culture of the second century while also exposing something of the variety of expression which was possible within this broadly unified imperial milieu.
While Juvenal and Aristides embody different positions and accordingly offer up divergent accounts of an increasingly homogenised world, we should be careful not to understand them in simplistic terms as, respectively, ‘against’ and ‘for’ a monolithic prevailing imperial ideology of universalism. Instead, I argue, we must recognise that both of their perspectives are deeply invested in the basic reality of Roman rule over the Mediterranean, and their distinct responses to its universalising effects are best understood as self-interested attempts to exploit these general trends in ways that reinforce their own specific positionalities within the Roman system. Neither Juvenal nor Aristides offers any meaningful challenge to imperial ideology.Footnote 12 In developing this analysis, I apply some novel theoretical approaches to the Roman empire that were originally developed with reference to recent history and the contemporary world. In doing so, I bring into focus features of the Roman empire that have significant resonances with the globalised world of the twenty-first century as well as elucidating some important respects in which the cultural and political worlds of Rome differ drastically from our own.
One productive way to approach the cultural-spatial developments of the early Roman empire is through Brenner and Schmid’s notion of ‘planetary urbanisation’, which has recently become influential in urban studies and understands ‘urbanisation’ as a process that cannot be reasonably confined to the building of densely inhabited spaces, but encompasses all of the economic processes enabled by and essentially centred in the world’s cities.Footnote 13 In this conceptualisation of the urban – developed to make sense of our modern, globalised world – cities can only be properly understood by taking into account the international trade networks, human migrations, and movements of capital that enable them to exist, although the dense centres constitute the focus of all this activity and justify it. Rome in the second century CE is little different (although admittedly far from planetary in its expanse): unique in its density of cultural, political, and economic institutions, as well as population, but impossible to understand without contending with the vast international apparatus that it had brought into being and which supported its immense population and cultural sway. Yet Rome was beginning to lose control of that apparatus, as its administrative mechanisms developed into a self-justifying system rather than the tools of a small city-state.
One of the important features of this approach is that it acknowledges the importance of the city-as-such which acts as the most important centre of economic and cultural activity while also addressing the city’s effects in reshaping the world far beyond its notional boundaries, helping us to consider Rome as b0th a city and an empire simultaneously. Unlike the sometimes-totalising understandings expressed by more general globalisation models, this approach recognises the inherently hierarchical relationships between the city and the territory it affects or controls while also emphasising the mutual dependence between them.Footnote 14 Planetary urbanisation is a theory of and about the twenty-first century, and its theorists insist on the historical distinctiveness of urban development in the contemporary world. While it is of course true that the scale and intensity of modern urbanisation far exceeds anything that had come before it, the same was true of the Roman empire: the city of Rome was the first in world history to approach or perhaps even exceed a population of one million, and such a size would not be approached again in Europe until after the Industrial Revolution.Footnote 15 In terms of the effects of this ancient megacity in radically reconfiguring spatial networks and patterns of cultural and economic exchange, the implications were, if not planetary, at least pan-Mediterranean.
It is to a world in which Rome was drawing in the whole of the Mediterranean and the Mediterranean was being reshaped by Rome that Juvenal and Aristides respond. As we will see, Juvenal’s and Aristides’ responses to the macroscopic forces changing their world take forms that correspond closely with the polarised ways that contemporary people make sense of large-scale change, along axes of nativism and cosmopolitanism that are respectively hostile to and celebratory of an increasingly interconnected world. This resemblance between antiquity and the contemporary world can be better appreciated through recourse to another recent ‘planetary’ theory, namely the modernist Friedman’s notion of ‘planetary modernism’: this expansive conception treats ‘modernism’ as an aesthetic phenomenon limited not by spatial or temporal factors but rather by its response to accelerated processes of change.Footnote 16 While it may seem perverse to refer the notion of ‘modernity’ to antiquity, doing so can help us recognise the similarities between the large-scale geopolitical circumstances of the Roman empire and the contemporary world. If Juvenal and Aristides respond to their world in ways that have striking resemblances to modern political and cultural discourses, this is not merely a coincidence but reflects a similarity of circumstance.
The provincialisation of Rome: Juvenal’s Satires 2 and 3
Juvenal’s third poem was published in his first book of Satires under Trajan early in the second century.Footnote 17 Famously, just a few years earlier, Quintilian had declared that in the genre of satire, to quote Freudenburg’s vivid paraphrase, ‘here, for once, and just this once, we Romans have something, at least this one thing that we can claim as our own and not derived from the Greeks’.Footnote 18 In the context of this particular understanding of the satiric genre, highly anxious about the status and independence of Latin literature, Juvenal unsurprisingly emphasises the distinctiveness and worthiness of Roman culture, understood here as strictly Latinate, constructing it in contrast to its Greek ‘other’. For the earlier satirists Lucilius, Horace, and Persius, this hierarchy had a clearer justification in Rome’s political and military dominance across the Mediterranean, where the figures in positions of authority were almost universally Italians and native Latin speakers, who typically moved out from the centre where they originated to the periphery they controlled. To be sure, an anxiety about the potentially pernicious influence of Greek culture at Rome is a characteristic feature of Latin writing in all genres from the very beginning, but it should be emphasised that in earlier literature this anxiety is very much focalised on Greekness as a more or less strictly cultural threat. Horace’s well-known declaration in his quasi-satirical Epistles that ‘captive Greece captured her savage victor and bore her arts against savage Latium’ (Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes | intulit agresti Latio, 2.156–7) frames the Greek conquest of Rome strictly in terms of its cultural effect (artes intulit), even as it simultaneously and ironically manifests the vibrance of Latin literary culture.Footnote 19
What is different for Juvenal is that Rome is now not just under threat from Greek cultural influence, but that Greek individuals are beginning to take up positions of power within the Roman administration.Footnote 20 To the traditional and rather abstract anxiety about cultural corruption is added the much more concrete fear that Greek interlopers might deprive native Romans of social advancement.Footnote 21 In 105, probably within a few years of Juvenal publishing his first book of poetry, Gaius Antius Aulus Julius Quadratus of Pergamon became the first ever individual of eastern Greek origin to be awarded an ordinary consulship, the single highest position in the Roman administration available short of the emperorship itself.Footnote 22 Syme memorably characterised these developments as ‘Greeks invading the Roman government’,Footnote 23 and Juvenal’s perspective is little different, albeit focalised on a somewhat lower stratum of Roman society. Rome’s governing elites had been gradually becoming more internationalised for decades, and by the early second century the ‘invasion’ was in full force. Juvenal, for his part, activates fluvial imagery to describe an influx of Greeks into Rome:Footnote 24
That group who is now most beloved by the wealthy among us, and whom I want most desperately to escape, I’ll hurry to speak of, and shame won’t stop me. I cannot stand, fellow Romans, this city made Greek – and what little portion of its dregs are Achaeans! The Syrian Orontes has long since poured into the Tiber, bringing with it its language and its customs and its jarring harps along with flautists, and those foreign drums, and those girls who are forced to offer themselves up in the Circus [Maximus].
Juvenal puts these words into the mouth of a certain Umbricius, a Roman man who has decided to leave the city for good and is explaining why. He first invokes the Greeks as ‘most beloved by the wealthy among us’ (divitibus gens acceptissima nostris): part of the point is precisely the ability of Greeks to infiltrate the highest echelons of society. But his satirical claim is that these Greeks and the values that they represent do not deserve this welcoming reception: while the Greeks coming into Rome might lay claim to an esteemed cultural reputation, they do not do so deservedly. They are not Achaei, a word which carries a double significance. On the one hand, it is the Latin equivalent of the Homeric Ἀχαιοί used to designate the heroes of the Trojan war in the central texts of the Greek cultural canon. But it is also a term for the inhabitants of the Roman province of Achaea, which contained the major cities of classical Greek history, not least Athens and Sparta, as well as great Panhellenic sanctuaries like Delphi and Olympia that remained cultural touchstones in the Roman period.Footnote 25 Umbricius suggests that Greeks in contemporary Rome cannot legitimately lay claim to the great Greek cultural and historical legacy. They are not the great heroes of Homer; they are not even from the ‘right’ part of the Greek-speaking world.Footnote 26 Juxtaposed here are two competing conceptions of the Mediterranean: an idealised and imaginary historical world in which the ‘proper’ spatial hierarchies held and Greece and its inhabitants could thereby deservedly lay claim to special status and cultural authority, and a contemporary world in which differentiation has broken down and Greekness lacks any stable geographical associations. The Hellenisation of Rome and of Syria are two sides of the same coin, interrelated symptoms of a world where the expected relationships between geography and identity no longer seem to hold.
The xenophobic posture adopted by Juvenal’s speaker denigrates the supposed cultural pretensions of Rome’s Greek population in order to undermine the social and political status that members of that community were able to access in part because of their ethnic associations with the cultural capital of Greek art, literature, and philosophy. This hostile attitude is closely connected to an anxiety that, on the one hand, Greeks are taking opportunities that might otherwise have been available to ‘locals’, and, also, that Hellenism might eclipse native Italian values as the dominant cultural system. Greeks – more precisely, Greeks born long after their reified classical past and far from the historical centres where that past took place – are, apparently, taking over as both the ‘innards’ and ‘future masters’ of Rome’s ‘great houses’ (viscera magnarum domuum dominique futuri, 3.72), a ‘grim prediction that Romans will end up the slaves of these Greek immigrants’.Footnote 27 Far from embodying the virtues of Homeric heroes, Juvenal depicts Greeks as deceptive opportunists whose alleged infiltration of Rome portends a fundamental inversion of the social order. Greeks can perform any job you can imagine (3.76–7), but most significantly of all, they comprise a threat to social position on a highly personal level, threatening to undermine the claim to special status that a local origin could afford:
A man blown into Rome by the wind – with the plums and figs – will he be signed up ahead of me and lie back resting on a better couch? Does it count for nothing that I spent my childhood breathing in the air of the Aventine, nourished by Sabine fruit?
Juvenal’s Umbricius worries about being usurped: the newcomer might somehow be able to outdo him and access a better seat at the dinner party (a central social institution which here functions as a figure for social success more generally) despite his firmly local roots. The metaphor is one of trade: just as fruit shipped in from the provinces renders the local produce less exciting, so too Greeks arriving in the city are displacing native-born Italians from their (supposedly) rightful place atop the social hierarchy.
Juvenal’s imagery – the Orontes flowing into the Tiber, commodities and people brought into Rome by sea – locates the source of Rome’s problems precisely in the inward flow of people, goods, and cultural influences from the empire’s provinces into its capital.Footnote 28 It portrays what is happening as a systemic problem. The issue is not quite that hordes of Greeks are descending on the city with malicious intent: Umbricius’ competitor at the dinner party did not sail deliberately into the city but was ‘blown into Rome by the wind’ (advectus Romam … vento). It is rather that broader and more abstracted geopolitical forces are causing fundamental changes to patterns of human and cultural movement. This is not a matter of individual actions but of quasi-natural developments (akin to flows of wind and water) happening on the immense and spatially non-specific scale of the empire as a whole. We might usefully think here in terms of the two basic cognitive metaphors that Moretti has suggested underlie most attempts to make sense of large-scale cultural developments: the tree and the wave.Footnote 29 Where the tree, through processes of branching, ‘describes the passage from unity to diversity’ and depends on ‘geographical discontinuity’, the wave ‘observes uniformity engulfing an initial diversity’ and ‘thrive[s] on geographical continuity’.Footnote 30 Moretti’s point is that cultural developments are best understood as a process of dialogue and interaction between waves and trees, in which homogenising forces sweeping over large areas (waves) are followed by a series of more confined and locally specific developments (trees), but also that in analyses of specific historical processes one of these metaphors can often be more fruitfully applied than the other.Footnote 31
Juvenal here clearly emphasises the wave of cultural change sweeping over the empire; but there is also a tree at play, insofar as he understands the effects of this change specifically as it is affecting the local context of the city of Rome. He approaches the (relatively) stable international system enabled by Roman hegemony through the particular lens of its effects on the imperial centre, which is rendered a kind of exaggerated microcosm of the empire as a whole because of incessant inward flows from the hinterland. The topos of Rome’s moral decline is a recurrent one in Latin literature, beginning already with Cato the Elder, the first author to publish prose writing in the language, and it became an especially characteristic theme within the genre of satire. What is distinctive about Juvenal’s approach is his attribution of this moral decline, at least in part, to a perceived collapse of strong distinctions between the city of Rome and its empire, between native-born, Latin-speaking Italians and the inhabitants of the provinces, and his activation of spatialised metaphors to describe it.
In his second satire, Juvenal makes this point perhaps even more directly than in the third. The speaker of this poem, too, asserts his desire to leave the capital:
I’d like to flee from here beyond the Sarmatians and the freezing Ocean, so often do they dare to preach about morals, those men who pretend to be like Curius while they live out Bacchanals.
He points beyond the limits of Roman hegemony to the Sarmatians of the Pontic Steppe and the Atlantic Ocean. ‘Here’ (hinc) is ambiguous, signalling both, quite specifically, the city of Rome and, more generally, the entirety of the territory under Roman control. The point, we will find out over the rest of the poem, is that escape from Rome and escape from its empire are in some sense the same thing, because Rome and its empire have been remade in each other’s image. Here, as in the second satire, however, Juvenal gives particular emphasis to the ways that Rome has been changed by the empire rather than vice versa. The focus is on the moral decline of the imperial centre – those who preach about morals ‘pretend to be like Curius’ (Curios simulant), a Roman hero of the republican period whose name became a byword for traditional virtue,Footnote 32 but the reality is they ‘live out Bacchanals’ (Bacchanalia vivunt), practising the ecstatic rituals of Dionysus with all his associations not just with drunkenness and immoderation, but also – via his mythological origins – with the east. The traditional virtues of Rome – in this poem, especially those associated with masculinity – have allegedly been displaced by corruption flowing in from its provinces, so the only escape from this morally bankrupt system is to escape Rome’s sphere of influence entirely.
At the end of the poem, Juvenal underscores the reciprocity of the corrupting exchange between Rome and its provinces:
We have, indeed, advanced our forces past the shores of Ireland, and the newly captive Orkneys and the Britons content with their brief nights, but the people we have defeated don’t do the kinds of things that happen now in the city of the victor. Yet they say that the Armenian Zalaces, more delicate than the rest of the youths, gave himself over to an impassioned tribune. See what exchange does! He was sent as a pledge: here we make them into ‘men’. If boys make a longer stay in the city, they will never lack for a lover. Trousers, daggers, bridles and whips will be abandoned: so it is Artaxata carries back their youthful customs.
This passage neatly schematises Rome’s effects upon the Mediterranean. The city – note the first-person plural verbs underscoring Juvenal’s and his Latinate audience’s notional membership of it – conquers and brings under its control an ever-increasing territory extending to the very edges of the world. The empire, Juvenal emphasises, now extends over the English Channel, and even beyond to Ireland and the Orkneys, into alien territory where such basic facts about the way the world works as the regular setting of the sun each night do not necessarily hold.Footnote 33 Yet, counter-intuitively, the effect of Roman control over this vast empire has been to effect an erosion of Roman virtue, indeed making the capital into an epicentre of moral corruption in its own right. Concentrated decadence flows into Rome from its provinces, which in turn flows back out in the reverse direction in a kind of ‘mutual conquest’:Footnote 34 it is this kind of mutual interdependence between the city-as-such and the territories it draws upon that is brought into focus by the concept of planetary urbanisation. The audaciously foreign-sounding Zalaces comes to Rome and picks up the habit of sexual behaviour coded as passive, with connotations not just of moral disapproval, but ambiguously also of Greekness, underscored by his designation as an ephebus (‘youth’), a Greek loan word.Footnote 35 Moreover, he abandons the traditional Armenian attributes of youth in favour of this internationalised idiom. ‘Trousers, daggers, bridles and whips’ might be strange and foreign at Rome, but they are the ordinary equipment of Armenian cavalrymen.Footnote 36 Roman hegemony is replacing the cultural variety of the empire not with the upstanding virtues that notionally enabled the city to establish its authority but with a thoroughly depraved version of Roman culture, supposedly corrupted by the influence of the empire’s provinces. Again Juvenal activates the imagery of international trade in describing this process, although here commercia pointedly carries an additional sexual connotation.Footnote 37
Situating Juvenal within Latinate Elite Culture
Ultimately, in these two poems Juvenal emphasises a perceived collapse of Rome’s distinctiveness within the oikoumene. The city’s conquest of the known world has apparently caused an erosion in the exceptionalism of its urban life and the character of its citizenry by enabling the supposedly decadent habits of the provinces to infiltrate it. The space of the empire as a whole collapses into the city of Rome, the city’s decay occurring because it is no longer adequately differentiated from the provinces. It is notoriously difficult to assess the ‘sincerity’ of satire,Footnote 38 but we need not necessarily understand Juvenal’s poems as ‘sincere’ to recognise that they are serious and meaningful responses to the reality of Rome in the second century. It is more or less impossible to say with any certainty whether Juvenal himself endorses the positions expressed in his poems, or whether his readers are supposed to agree with them.Footnote 39 Indeed some degree of tonal ambiguity is part of the point. That Umbricius has chosen the Italian Greek city of Cumae, of all places, to retire to from Rome casts an ironic shadow over everything he says about the Greeks of Rome.Footnote 40 Nonetheless, the perspectives to which he gives expression must have at least been comprehensible and legible within the context where they were produced: Umbricius’ inconsistency only makes sense if he is being hypocritical about issues that were a recognisable dimension of the contemporary cultural discourse at Rome. That is to say, Juvenal’s poetry must on some level channel, if perhaps in exaggerated form, social discourse that circulated outside the poems.Footnote 41 In particular, the perspectives he voices must have made sense to the elite, Latin-reading audience whom he was addressing: it is worth emphasising that for all Juvenal is interested in profane subject matter, and for all that his satiric voice often adopts the perspective of those of somewhat low status (so Umbricius),Footnote 42 his poems are highly learned and must have only been read by the relatively small segment of the empire’s population who was not just literate in Latin for practical purposes but also educated in reading poetry and rhetoric.Footnote 43 To a certain extent the perspective of the lower-status Umbricius can be understood as an expression of the prejudices and anxieties of elite Latinate Romans in the voice of a figure whose social position is somewhat displaced from their own and therefore less discomforting.Footnote 44
The displeasure with Rome that Umbricius expresses in the second satire fundamentally and recurrently revolves around his status anxiety (2.23–5, 126–7, 164–5). In Freudenburg’s diagnosis, Umbricius ‘has presumed to take a seat, and “belong” there, in Rome, only to be told that he is in the wrong spot, sitting in a seat of honor to which he is not entitled’.Footnote 45 This is important: the point is not just that foreigners and foreign influences are taking over the city, but, just as importantly, that this assault threatens the position of its Latinate inhabitants whose position at the top of the social and political hierarchy is beginning to erode.Footnote 46 The reality underpinning the poem is not so much, I think, that there were meaningfully more Greeks resident in Rome nor that Greek culture was meaningfully more influential in the city than a century earlier,Footnote 47 but rather that the social hierarchy notionally positioning (native) Latin speakers as superior to Greek speakers, and with a better claim to Romanness, had become less well defined.Footnote 48 This is a perspective that may have resonated with Latin speakers all over the empire just as much as with those living at Rome: Umbricius might be speaking about the capital, but the changing social hierarchies that he points to must have been felt to some extent wherever in the empire Latin speakers coexisted with foreigners (which is to say, everywhere).Footnote 49
Juvenal, then, gives us an important glimpse into how changes in the ethnic and geographic hierarchies of the Roman empire would have felt among some of its Latinate elites. It is a story all too familiar in the twenty-first century, resonating with ethnonationalist discourse in many countries that refocuses anxieties about the localised effects of globalisation upon immigrant and other minority groups.Footnote 50 The ethno-cultural uniformity of the governing classes begins to be broken down as other groups (in second-century Rome, not only Greeks but also Latinate provincials from Gaul, Spain, and eventually Africa) start to have some limited degree of access to the highest ranks of authority, and this is understood as a threat to the status of the ethno-cultural group (Latin-speaking Italians) who previously had exclusive control of the levers of power. Just as in contemporary fearmongering about mass migration and the globalised economy, convenient scapegoats are portrayed as corrupting influences that pose a threat not only in economic terms but also to some imagined cultural purity.Footnote 51 That Umbricius’ attempts to maintain distinctions between Greeks and Romans and to uphold the traditional hierarchies between them are contradictory and logically inconsistent does not necessarily undermine them: indeed, it is generally characteristic of nativist perspectives that they depend more upon visceral feelings about the ‘other’ than strictly logical reasoning. Umbricius might come across to many contemporary readers, confident in their own cosmopolitan values, as ‘comically old-fashioned and backward-looking’,Footnote 52 but we should not be too quick to dismiss his perspective as parodic, overlooking its potential to resonate with certain kinds of readers both in its original context and in today’s world.Footnote 53
In a sense, Juvenal’s satires comprise a lament for the days when Rome and its inhabitants occupied an unquestioned position at the top of the social and spatial hierarchy of the empire. Umbricius’ neurotic insistence on his pure Roman upbringing is a desperate claim to status that was already out of date. Juvenal published these poems under Trajan: not just the first emperor to be born outside Italy, but also the first emperor who would spend more of his reign outside Rome than in it. Rome would remain the capital for another century and a half after Juvenal, but in practical terms its importance for the empire was already well on its way to being primarily symbolic. Juvenal recognises that the spatial configuration that was produced by Rome’s conquest of the Mediterranean, with the city occupying a position as the undisputed centre of political and cultural authority, was in the process of giving way to a much more decentralised and diffused spatial model. Rome the city was being displaced by Rome the empire. Juvenal’s response to this spatial reconfiguration may be xenophobic and rooted in social anxiety, but it is a valuable document of how these large-scale and gradual changes to Roman imperial space were experienced ‘on the ground’ by the inhabitants of the capital.Footnote 54
The Romanisation of the Provinces: Aelius Aristides’ To Rome
Aelius Aristides’ To Rome was composed a few decades after Juvenal’s first book of Satires, probably in 144,Footnote 55 and comprises an equally valuable document of how these changes to the spatial hierarchies of the empire could be understood not by the inhabitants of Rome but rather by Greek-speaking elites from the eastern provinces. We have seen, via Juvenal, one take on how things look from the capital. Aristides allows us to address an important question posed recently by Sorensen: ‘How does the world look from other locations, other points of entry?’Footnote 56 There is not just one way to look at the Roman empire. From Aristides’ vantage point outside the city, Roman control of the Mediterranean represents not threat but opportunity. Although he was not, strictly speaking, one of Syme’s ‘Greeks invading the Roman government’ because he did not himself attain any significant administrative posting, he found success in large part due to his ability to position himself in close contact to the highest levels of the Roman administration, including the emperor Marcus Aurelius.Footnote 57 Aristides’ career as an orator exemplifies the geographical and social mobility available to members of the Roman elite, including those who originated from the provinces, and it is this perspective that his speech embodies.
It is true that Aristides’ speech, presented as a thank-offering for a safe journey delivered on the orator’s arrival at Rome, with its panegyrical stance, could hardly have offered up a negative image of Rome or the effects of its power. However, what is striking about it, when considered alongside Juvenal’s Satires, is the way in which it approaches its argument for the greatness of the city of Rome. Although it is notionally delivered in praise of the city of Rome, Aristides manages to say almost nothing about the city as such: not its monuments, not its history, not its cultural accomplishments.Footnote 58 Instead, he frames his praise in spatial terms that resonate closely with Juvenal in their emphasis on the reduction of spatial differentiation across the empire. But where Juvenal drew attention to Rome’s increasing resemblance to its provinces, Aristides sees things from the opposite direction, focusing instead on the provinces’ increased resemblance to the capital. These are, of course, two – diametrically opposed – ways of looking at the same basic phenomenon. Rome is becoming its empire or the empire is becoming Rome: the point, either way, is that space is becoming more homogeneous. This is fundamentally a difference in perspective between the inhabitants of the empire’s centre and those of the periphery. Aristides’ ‘peripheral location seems to open up other ways of seeing, evaluating, and judging’ that are distinctively different from Juvenal’s.Footnote 59 At work in both cases is a wave in Moretti’s terms, but where we could trace a tree emerging in Juvenal’s emphasis on its highly localised consequences at Rome, for Aristides, whose focus is macroscopic, the process of historical change seems to tend much more purely towards sameness.
Aristides offers up a vision of a ‘city’ of Rome that is practically co-extensive with its empire. According to him, in the case of Rome, ‘unlike other [cities], it is impossible to declare “here it is”’ (οὐχ ὥσπερ ἐπὶ τῶν ἄλλων εἰπεῖν ἔστιν, ὡς ἐνταῦθα ἕστηκεν, 26.9). It is a city whose centre is simultaneously nowhere and everywhere (26.7). What is remarkable about Rome as a city is in some sense precisely the fact that it has rendered itself relatively unremarkable by spreading its attractions over its entire empire. Aristides acknowledges the existence of the densely populated core that is ‘Rome proper’ but denies the adequacy of this core to giving a full account of the city, recognising something about it that significantly foreshadows the central ideas underpinning Brenner and Schmid’s planetary urbanisation. For Aristides, talking about the city of Rome means talking about the entire space of the Roman empire; this is the only way to address the city properly. The city itself – where the emperor (notionally) lives, where the senate meets – is only a nominal centre for a metaphorical ‘city’ which spreads across the empire. This is a perspective, to some extent, that could only be expressed by somebody who was not an inhabitant of the empire’s capital, representing a powerful challenge to the Romanocentric discourse embodied by Juvenal, and in itself signalling and reflecting the ongoing decline of Rome as the unquestioned centre of elite cultural production.
To the extent that walls generally served to define the limits of cities in the ancient world, Aristides asserts that Rome ‘did not neglect walls, but placed these not around the city but around the empire’ (τειχῶν γε μὴν οὐκ ἠμελήσατε, ταῦτα δὲ τῇ ἀρχῇ περιεβάλετε, οὐ τῇ πόλει, 26.80). The limits of the city become indeterminate, theoretically expanded to the edges of its empire. The space of Rome is limited only by the walls that mark the far reaches of its influence. In reality, the limits of the city of Rome were probably never really conceived of as coextensive with any system of walls until the construction of the Aurelian wall between 271 and 275 CE, which powerfully reshaped the city’s topography and the ways in which its limits were understood.Footnote 60 Aristides here plays on a general understanding that walls define the boundaries of cities, activating and making rhetorical use of the fact that in the case of Rome, its urban extent was not neatly defined by walls. Rome’s citizenship, according to Aristides, also has little to do with physical location or genealogical origin (26.60), stretching the city’s political boundaries to its empire’s edges. But it is in his comparison of Rome to the institutions of Greek cities that he most directly expresses his vision of the equivalency between Rome as city and Rome as empire:
ὅπερ δὲ πόλις τοῖς αὑτῆς ὁρίοις καὶ χώραις ἐστίν, τοῦθ᾽ ἥδε ἡ πόλις τῆς πάσης οἰκουμένης, ὥσπερ αὐτῆς χώρας ἄστυ κοινὸν ἀποδεδειγμένη· φαίης ἂν περιοίκους ἅπαντας ἢ κατὰ δῆμον οἰκοῦντας ἄλλον χῶρον εἰς μίαν ταύτην ἀκρόπολιν συνέρχεσθαι.
Aristid. Or. 26.61
What another city is to its own borders and territory, this city is to those of the entire inhabited world, as if it had been appointed the common town for that district. You might say that all the perioeci or all those living in the outer demes come together in this single acropolis.
Rome, then, is remarkable because despite the vast size of its empire, it functions like a single city.Footnote 61 He suggests that Rome and its empire are like Athens and its demes or Sparta and its perioeci, a cohesive political community on the model of a classical Greek polis.Footnote 62 Just as Athens and Sparta had acropoleis that provided a central place of refuge and civic definition for constituent communities spread over both urban and rural spaces, so too Rome functions for the territory that it controls. That the scale of Rome’s polis is unfathomably enlarged is precisely the point.
When Aristides talks about ‘life in Rome’, he really talks about ‘life in the Roman empire’; that is to say, he makes no distinction between how it is to live at Rome and how it is to live under Rome. In his conception, there seems to be little meaningful difference where exactly one lives in the empire; rather, Roman hegemony has the effect of erasing difference, of making all its empire equally peaceful, equally interconnected. Aristides’ vision is emphatically cosmopolitan, even ‘post-local’, to use Richter’s term.Footnote 63 Aristides’ depiction of Rome is an exaggerated encomium of the city and its empire, and one which should be understood against the somewhat different visions of the Greek world that he develops in some of his other speeches.Footnote 64 But in this speech at least, he develops an image of Rome as an imperial power that has delivered real and imagined benefits to the oikoumene precisely by making it more interconnected and less differentiated.Footnote 65 Rome’s effects on space within the Mediterranean are understood as radiating out of the capital and enabling the inhabitants of the provinces to enjoy positions equivalent to those held by inhabitants of the capital within the social hierarchy of the empire. This is a portrayal of the empire that is every bit as politicised as Juvenal’s, insofar as it deliberately ignores its cultural and linguistic diversity to advance an optimistic vision of homogeneous participation in and belonging to the apparatus of the empire. There is no doubt that Rome’s effects on its territory were nowhere near as totalising as Aristides makes it seem.
Aristides and Juvenal in an Empire in Flux
We can contrast Juvenal’s emphasis on the diversification of the empire’s centre with Aristides’ on the connectivity of its peripheral regions. Underlying both perspectives is the reality that opportunities at Rome and in the imperial administration were increasingly available to a widening range of people. For Juvenal this seems to represent a threat to the status of Latinate Italians, while Aristides is able to see it as an extension of opportunity to people like himself from Rome’s outer provinces. These particular responses are highly specific: both the provincialisation of Rome and the Romanisation of the provinces might easily be read through alternative lenses.Footnote 66 Increasing diversity in the capital could be understood as a virtue, enabling rich cultural exchange and vibrant economic development: so, for example, Athenaeus’ praise of the city around the turn of the third century as an ‘epitome of the inhabited world’ (ἐπιτομὴν τῆς οἰκουμένης, 20b) with ‘foreign peoples settled there in their entirety’ (ὅλα ἔθνη ἀθρόως αὐτόθι συνῴκισται, 20c). Equally, the entrenchment of Roman state machinery across the empire might be understood as a pernicious process that threatens to erase the particularities of the traditional cultures of the empire’s various provinces. The value judgements that Juvenal and Aristides make reflect their own particular vantage points.
It might seem counterintuitive that Aristides, notionally a colonised subject of Roman power, expresses more positive sentiment towards the effects of empire than Juvenal, who was a member of the more dominant ethnolinguistic group in the empire, but it is legible as an effect of Aristides’ own position within the empire’s power structures. The forces at work here have some analogies to the early stages of modern postcolonial literatures where ‘texts … come into being within the constraints of a discourse and the institutional practice of a patronage system which limits and undercuts their assertion of a different perspective’.Footnote 67 We must recognise, however, that there is at least one extremely important difference between the case of Greek writers in the Roman empire and modern postcolonial writers, namely that the cultural capital associated with the Greek language and literary tradition was immense (as Juvenal recognises) and in this period arguably still greater than that associated with Latin. Aristides’ position resembles only to a certain extent that of most modern writers considered under the rubric of postcolonial studies, who typically write either in the language of the imperial power or, less commonly, within a linguistic tradition that has struggled to find a place on an international stage.Footnote 68 Casanova’s more general remarks on the effects of the achievement of mainstream literary success upon those who originate from peripheral regions are helpful here:
the effects of consecration by the central authorities can be so powerful as to give certain writers from the margins who have achieved full recognition the illusion that the structure of domination has simply disappeared; seeing themselves as living proof of the establishment of a new ‘world literary order’. Universalizing from their particular case, they claim that we are witnessing a total and definitive reversal of the balance of power between centre and peripheries.Footnote 69
This analysis can help us recognise that Aristides’ optimistic perspective on the reshaping of the Roman world is unavoidably shaped by the historical circumstances of his own ability to find success within it, without necessarily implying that he is approaching the empire in quite the same way that modern postcolonial writers have done. Almost all of our surviving literature from the Roman empire – with the notable and partial exception of many early Christian texts – is the product of cultures of reading and writing centred among the empire’s most wealthy and well-connected inhabitants: there could be little reason for these men who were thriving in the imperial system to meaningfully undercut its justifications.
In modern terms, Aristides reads like a globalist in his advocacy for a highly connected quasi-globalised system as a provider of prosperity and opportunity across a vast territory, while Juvenal reads like a nativist, highly sceptical of the effects of decentralising forces and their threat to the status quo at centres of power. This is where a reading of these writers through a lens like Friedman’s ‘planetary modernism’ becomes useful insofar as it points to the ways in which similar kinds of macroscopic change can produce similar aesthetic responses in different historical and cultural contexts. Juvenal and Aristides offer up xenophobia and cosmopolitanism, respectively, as responses to a world that, like our own, is in important respects becoming more homogeneous while falling under the control of an increasingly delocalised elite. While these two poses are often, especially in contemporary political discourse, understood as oppositional, Aristides and Juvenal can help us recognise that they can have more in common than we might otherwise suspect. Both positions are essentially dedicated to maintaining existing structures of power and unquestioningly accept the reality of Roman hegemony. Both are also, incidentally, in this case founded on a basic spatial conception that is relational and network-based rather than territorial or cartographic. The differences come only in how support for the Roman system of government is nuanced into alignment with the self-interest of the groups that Juvenal and Aristides represent.
That Juvenal and Aristides were able to offer highly divergent accounts of the effects of these developments does not imply any real difference between the two in terms of their basic allegiance to the Roman empire. Rather, it is a matter of perspective: the integration of the Mediterranean into a single imperial system looked different from different parts of the empire and to those speaking different languages. In spatial terms, Juvenal looks from the centre and sees the periphery collapsing in on it, while Aristides looks from the periphery and sees the centre expanding outward. But in both cases there is no real escape from Rome except by going beyond the farthest borders of its empire: the city is, in some sense, coextensive with its sphere of influence. There is nothing truly radical in these writers’ responses: we are witness to them spinning Rome’s homogenising effects in ways that are carefully constructed to reinforce their own positions, and by extension the positions of their imagined audiences, within the imperial system.
Juvenal’s denigration of foreign influences at Rome laments the decline of the city’s morality – and by extension implies that the city’s Latinate ‘true’ inhabitants, among them implicitly himself and his readers, retain some claim to superiority even if that status is currently under threat and in decline. His poetry ironically serves to reinforce the cultural distinctions whose collapse it laments: the continued flourishing of Latin satire, that most Roman genre of poetry, belies claims about the decline of traditional Roman culture. Juvenal clings to the idea Rome can still be the hegemonic ‘here’ defined against the dominated ‘there’ of the provinces. Aristides’ praise of Rome’s ecumenical nature similarly reinforces the position of the empire’s Greek-speaking provincial elites. His speech constitutes a performance of belonging, its encomium of Rome containing within it an argument for the right of non-Italian, non-Latinate individuals to enjoy the same kinds of status and opportunities as the empire’s traditional governing classes. If Rome is a city that constitutes the entirety of the empire, there is no justification for discriminating between the inhabitants of different parts, so the implicit argument goes. Aristides makes a claim that everywhere in the empire is ‘here’. He encourages the homogenisation of the empire, while Juvenal deplores it, but neither expresses any real doubt about the system as such. As Witcher has suggested, ‘[l]ike globalization today, Roman globalization made it difficult to articulate any alternative’.Footnote 70
What is distinctively different from the processes of globalisation and deterritorialisation that have affected the modern world is that Roman hegemony offered its subjects an alternative system of civic belonging at the same time as it rendered older ones obsolete. One of the great challenges of the contemporary world is the elusive task of reconciling the territorial idea of the nation-state, which remains a primary source of identification and legitimation for the great majority of people, with an ever more globalised cultural, political, and financial economy that undermines its justifications and pushes nationalisms into defensive and often cruel poses.Footnote 71 Rome was able to mitigate the alienating effects of widespread migration upon traditional notions of belonging that were construed on civic and ethnic lines by offering itself as the foundation of an alternative community of belonging and shared values, at least to men from certain kinds of backgrounds. It made its own authority as a political and cultural formation inseparable from the macroscopic effects that that authority had, as Aristides seems to have recognised. He writes himself into full membership of the empire; correspondingly, what he is most emphatically not doing is developing some kind of national, regional, or ethnic consciousness defined against the empire, which has often been seen as one of the central projects of the ‘postcolonial’ literatures of the twentieth century.Footnote 72 This is not to offer up the Roman empire as a solution for the modern world, but rather to underscore the inevitable salience of questions of identity in historical periods characterised by decentralising forces,Footnote 73 and to make sense of what is different between today and 2,000 years ago, and why. In this regard it is undoubtedly significant that Roman imperial culture was not founded on a highly developed colour-based racial system akin to those that have structured the world in recent centuries, enabling the empire’s inhabitants from outside Italy to participate more readily in Roman structures of civic belonging.Footnote 74
Juvenal and Aristides provide us with a glimpse of the ways in which different elite groups navigated the internationalisation of Roman identity and the gradual decline of the capital city’s privileged status within its own empire. The long period of Roman rule fundamentally altered the ways in which people in Rome and throughout the Mediterranean basin imagined their relationships both to their local communities and to the much larger political formations of the Roman empire. The second century represents a pivotal period in the development of Roman imperial space, as the lines between city and empire start to blur more and more: things were changing, and the empire’s elites were taking note. Eventually, the city of Rome would all but lose even its symbolic role in the ideology of its empire, with the establishment of new capital cities beginning in the late third century. Its eastern half – now conventionally known as the Byzantine empire – carried on happily calling itself the ‘Kingdom of the Romans’ (Βασιλεία Ῥωμαίων) until the fifteenth century, without any meaningful ambition to encompass Rome within its territory. It is only after the Greek nation-state was formulated in the first half of the nineteenth century that Greek speakers would reassert an identity as Greeks or ‘Hellenes’ (Ἕλληνες) after well over a millennium of primarily labelling themselves ‘Romans’ (Ῥωμαίοι). To this very day, people from the region corresponding to the eastern province of Dacia continue to identify themselves as ‘Romans’ (Români, conventionally ‘Romanians’ in English).Footnote 75 Western Europe, too, would have its own succession of rulers, beginning with Charlemagne, who adopted the title of ‘Emperor of the Romans’ (Imperator Romanorum) without controlling the city. The decoupling of Romanness from Rome would be one of the most significant and long-lasting effects of the empire.
What we witness with Juvenal and Aristides is a pair of figures responding to a transitional period where Rome-as-city and Rome-as-empire were both simultaneously important ideological constructs. Juvenal’s response may be xenophobic and defensive, but his anxiety about the decline of the city’s distinctiveness within the empire will turn out to be well justified. Aristides’ optimism about the decentralisation of Roman power and the opportunities that this provides to the inhabitants of the empire’s provinces – and especially the Greek-speaking eastern provinces from which he himself originates – similarly presages a continued decoupling of the levers of Roman power from the geographical location where they were originally centralised. The city of Rome may still have been the centre of the world in the second century CE, but its prolonged control of the Mediterranean was beginning to produce new ways of imagining the operation of Roman power. Rome’s elites were beginning to think about the empire in terms of dispersal, rather than centralisation. The centralised model of imperial space that had brought about the Roman empire was giving way to a new configuration: Juvenal and Aristides – along with the rest of the empire’s inhabitants – were simply trying to make sense of how these changes were affecting their own position.
Acknowledgments
My sincere thanks to the editors of this special volume, Maxine Lewis and Amy Russell, for their hands-on support and feedback in developing this article. I first began to think seriously about Juvenal in a graduate seminar with Jared Hudson; Aristides was first introduced to me by Kathleen Coleman, who also reviewed a manuscript of this article and has been a constant source of guidance in recent years. I wrote the first complete draft during an excavation season at ancient Corinth in 2022: thank you to everybody who provided support and conversation over those weeks. Finally, I extend my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers, whose feedback has substantially improved this article.
