Monsters at the edges of the world : geography and rhetoric under the Roman empire

Descriptions of the edges of the Roman world were shaped by social preoccupations and identity issues. Living in a newly unified Roman world, the popularizing geographers of the early Empire (Strabo, Mela, Pliny) used descriptions of fictional and remote people such as the utopian Hyperboreans, the cannibal Scythians and the monstrous Dog-Heads to present customs and behaviors that were utterly un-Roman. These rhetorical descriptions helped define Roman identity through antithetical exempla. In contrast to this, the fifth and sixth centuries, the anonymous authors of legends surrounding the figure of Saint Christopher witnessed a crisis of Roman identity fostered by a new 'barbarian' presence within the Empire and by the expansion of the Christian (i.e. Roman) faith outside of the Empire. Their response was to tear down the ginary barrier between the Roman world and fictional, remote people and to proclaim the forceful Christianization of distant lands