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Such displays forcefully communicated the message of Roman dominance, which geographical theorists now had to accommodate in their conception of the world and its physical and political forces. Clarke proposed Polybius, Posidonius, and Strabo as the three Hellenistic geographers who led their field in writing philosophical geography to fit the new political reality (Clarke 1999: 193; also Nicolet 1991: 47, on Strabo’s “intentions”). Roman claims to global domination persisted in political and geographical discourses for several centuries, reflected early on in Polybius’s remarks (3.59.3–4) on Roman conquests and the expansion of geographical knowledge. He credits Alexander’s empire with knowledge of Asia, and Romans with everywhere else, an assertion based more on Roman primacy throughout the oikoumenē than actual possession of it (Nicolet 1991: 30–31). Later in the first centuries BCE and CE there emerged a notion that in conquest and knowledge of the Near East Rome succeeded the four “world” empires: Assyria, Media, Persia, and Macedonia, although recognition of the rival Parthians complicated that picture.¹³ Strabo and Pliny the Elder represent the solidification of the Roman geopolitics: both describe the oikoumene in a circuit around the Mediterranean with Rome at the physical and allegorical center, much as the Peutinger Table’s source later depicted (Nicolet 1991: 172–173, 192–194; Clarke 1999: 210ff; Murphy 2004: 132ff).