From Athens to Rome: Aelius Aristides and the Romanization of Greece

Abstract

The present article tries to expose why for Aristide Rome is the completion of Athens, although the text in which he idealizes the latter is much later than the one in which he idealizes the former. This is because Athens failed to shape a political hegemony based on her cultural and military supremacy, which forced her to use violence even against her allies, harming herself; hers was an empire of prestige, not of power. But forming an empire was a prerequisite for the acquisition of political hegemony, followed by political learning through experience. This is how political art was built, of which Rome was the artist, and whose pillars would be the formation of a universal citizenship within the empire and its pyramidal arrangement. A prince-god who presided over the whole, who imparted justice with impartiality and who dispensed with the abuse of force thanks to the rationalization introduced by the bureaucratization of power.