How would Roman citizens have viewed Egyptians, or Syrians, or Palestinians or Anatolians? I ask these specifically because there exists a pretty deep seated rift between the Middle Eastern peoples and the West today, and frankly, that's all I have ever known. But towards the latter end of the Roman Empire, these lands had been a part of the Roman State for centuries. Rome even had an Arab Emperor at one point. So essentially, did Roman citizens view Egyptians and such as fellow Romans and equals, in the way citizens in a modern nation state do (in theory), or was there a degree of dissent towards accepting these peoples as 'true' Romans, and was there a marked difference between the regular civilians and elite in this regard?
There is a broad scholarship on the origins of Western Orientalism that stems from the Roman period. A very accessible one is Anthony Pagden's "Worlds at War" (2008). Roman thinking shifted on the issue as the empire expanded, but essentially Roman society was based upon the idea of the civitas-- a commonwealth that was defined by citizenship, common laws and shared values rather than ethnic identification (Patrick Geary's book "The Myth of Nations" deals with this in depth). Ideologically, "Romanitas" (or "Romanness") was an open category that theoretically all could belong to and, therefore, made no distinctions between European Romans and those of the East (in practice this could vary, but even Jews could be a Roman citizen). However, the Persians outside the empire as well as the Germanic tribes were typically seen as inferior or "uncivilized."
Also, recall that the Middle East at this time was not Arab (the Arabs migrated into the region in the 7th and 8th centuries). Egypt, Anatolia and the Levant were primarily Greek during the Roman and Byzantine period.