Abstract This article considers how a pair of authors working in different languages and generic contexts responded to the changing spatial politics of the second-century Roman empire. Understanding the Roman literary world as an interconnected bilingual system, I explore polarised responses to an increasingly decentralised and cosmopolitan Roman Mediterranean. Juvenal and Aelius Aristides navigate a tension between the city of Rome itself and the empire for which it served as the notional capital, both perceiving that the empire is becoming more homogeneous, with distinctions between centre and periphery becoming less sharp. While Juvenal sees the increasing similarity between Rome and its provinces through a xenophobic lens as a symbol of the city and its native Latin population’s moral decline, Aristides emphasises instead the benefits that Roman hegemony has brought to an oikoumene that he asserts has been rendered a single polis . These differences are partly a function of genre but can also be understood in terms of the geographical and ethnolinguistic backgrounds of each writer, and provide a valuable picture of the diversity of the empire’s cultural politics, resonating in productive ways with contemporary debates about migration and nationalism.
Paul Johnston (Mon,) studied this question.