Laudator Temporis Acti

Ramsay MacMullen (1928-2022), Enemies of the Roman Order (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 215:

After as before Caesar's campaigns, "all Gaul was divided"—not into three, rather into thirty or a hundred clusters of kinsfolk, some large, some paltry. So also in the Greek world. Pliny (Nat. hist. 5.146f) could count 195 "peoples and tetrarchies" in Galatia alone. Every province was the same. Far from being a congregation of city-states, in the ecstatic vision of Aelius Aristides (to say nothing of descriptions to be found occasionally in modern writers), the empire was rather made up of thousands of tribes. Many and infinitely the more important ones had risen to an urban life. Others were only partly dissolved into an undifferentiated peasantry and others again arrested in a semibarbarous condition. They did not love their nation; there was none to love. They did not hate Rome. The horizons of Musones, Brisei, Garamantes, Bessi, Cietae, Mauri, Maratocupreni, Tencteri, and the rest whose strange names have appeared in this chapter surely reached no further than their neighbors' inviting fields, cattle, and houses.