ABSTRACT
From Britain to Egypt, from Portugal to Iran, throughout the north coast of Africa and along the Rhine and the Danube, the influence and power of Rome were known by 50 BC (see Figure 1), and the Roman aristocrats who busied themselves in Rome over the internal wranglings of their own small coterie knew about the places included within this vast region and might have visited a good number of them. It was a region characterized by great diversity of geography, climate, peoples and cultures. If by AD 180 many of them had achieved a semblance of unity, it was the effect not of internal development but of their relationship with Rome. In 50 BC a tour through such countries produced wide-eyed fascination at the differences between peoples, reflected in the voluminous ethnographies of the Greek experts Posidonius (c. 135-c. 51/50 BC) and Strabo (c. 64/3 BC-C. AD 24/5).1
