As the epigraph suggests, on a rough conceptual level, the Romans adopted the barest of ancient cliches for their broad understanding of Africa. Unfortunately, modern cultural theorists of the Afrocentrist school have favoured an even more naively binarist reading of the ancient world's discourse of Africa, with the result that the seminal classical distinction between ‘two Ethiopias’ is itself ignored. So, for instance, V.Y. Mudimbe argues that ‘from Herodotus onward, the West's self-representations have always included images of peoples situated outside of its cultural and imaginary frontiers … imagined and rejected as the intimate and other side of the European-thinking subject’ (1994, xi). Thus ‘the Greek [and, by extension, Roman] imagination’ could only observe ‘a uniform order of alterity’ and hence ‘Europe … invented the savage as a representation of its own negated double’ (xii). There is no room here for an ‘other’ that might itself be diversified.

Informed readers will recognise in this bleak choice a simplistic paradigm of alterity made almost universal by Foucault, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Sara Suleri and others (Van Wyk Smith, 1996, and see the Introduction to this work). The ancient paradigm of ‘two Ethiopias’ may indeed have been naive, but it did at least have the merit of suggesting a dialectic polarity that intermittently allowed, or challenged, early Mediterranean observers of African peoples to make more or less informed assessments of the people they met in order to decide which category of ‘Ethiopians’ they were dealing with. Sub- Egyptian Africa in its entirety was not necessarily ‘other’; it was specifically non- Mediterranean-littoral and non-Meroitic Africa that was ‘other’ in a broadly derogatory sense; and out of this dichotomy, a certain play of perceptions and even polemic could at times develop. Such judgements may often have been crude and racist, but they allowed for interstices and diversions in the early European discourse of Africa that could lead more cautious observers to betterinformed conclusions.