Where there any stereotypes associated with different parts of the Roman Empire?

by Theodore-Hunter

Did, say, people from Gaul have a reputation for being loud and brutish, or did Syrians have a reputation for being lazy and unbathed, etc. ?

Tiako

Certainly. Granted, we only hear snatches of things like this, but there is one nice passage in Lucian (Icaromenippus, 16) in which the narrator lists things he saw when he was flying around:

I could not go through the whole of it, even to please you; to take it in with the eyes kept one busy. But the main divisions were very much what Homer gives from the shield of Achilles: here junketings and marriages, there courts and councils, in another compartment a sacrifice, and hard by a mourning. If I glanced at Getica, I would see the Getae at war; at Scythia, there were the Scythians wandering about on their waggons; half a turn in another direction gave me Egyptians at the plough, or Phoenicians haggling, Isaurians thieving, Spartan flagellants, Athenians at law.

The activities engaged in are clearly stereotypical for the regions: Isaurians are thought of as bandits, Athenians are litigious, Phoenicians are hard nosed merchants, and so on. We can't construct a stereotypical map of the empire or anything, but we have some hints.