What significations did Egypt have for the Romans a century after Actium and afterwards? How
did Greek imperial authors respond to the Roman fascination with the Nile? This book explores
Egypt's aftermath beyond the hostility of Augustan rhetoric and Greek and Roman topoi of
Egyptian barbarism. Set against history and material culture Julio-Claudian Flavian Antonine
and Severan authors reveal a multivalent Egypt that defines Rome's increasingly diffuse
identity while remaining a tertium quid between Roman Selfhood and foreign Otherness.
Vespasian's Alexandrian uprising his recognition of Egypt as his power basis and his
patronage of Isis re-conceptualize Egypt past the ideology of Augustan conquest. The
imperialistic exhilaration and moral angst attending Rome's Flavian cosmopolitanism find an
expressive means in the geographically and semantically nebulous Nile. The rapprochement with
Egypt continues in the second and early third centuries. The Hellenic Antonines and the
African-Syrian Severans expand perceptions of geography and identity within an increasingly
decentralized and diverse empire. In the political and cultural discourses of this period the
capacious symbolics of Egypt validate the empire's religious and ethnic pluralism.
