Contemporary scholarship on fandom explores how communities are created through affinities of taste. Drawing on that work, this chapter argues that Cicero’s account in De Finibus and Pro Archia of his and his fellow Romans’ investment in and debt to Athenian literature experiments with the effects of passionately identifying with another culture – thus opening up ways of thinking and feeling about citizenship as an aesthetic property that transcends the limits of ethnic or linguistic identity. Hellenistic literature, organiSed in part around the trope of Athens as a universalist model of human excellence – a trope used first by Athenian writers and appropriated by writers in both Greek and Latin in the first century BCE – helps make the concept of universal citizenship thinkable, not only for Romans like Cicero but for readers over centuries (including scholars and students of 'classics' today) who shared and sustained his investment in the Athenian Greek past. This fantasy of cultural belonging obscures the violence of Roman imperial reality and helps explain the persistent appeal of 'classical' Greek literature.

This chapter explores a second key human –commercial corridor that acts as a channel for a specific trading network. It explores the activities of traders who identify with adjacent regions of Afghanistan and Central Asia. These traders currently live and work in Istanbul and Jeddah. Afghan merchants of backgrounds very different from those discussed in the previous chapter bring together East Asia, the Arabian Peninsula and Turkey as a triangle. Going beyond the tendency in much scholarly work to fixate on the East –West connectivity of the ‘Silk Road’, the chapter explores these networks in relationship to the geographical scale of West Asia– a geographical concept points towards a geographical scale that is defined by specific characteristics and dynamics but that is also inherently part of Asia more generally. The distinctive nature of the networks described in this chapter is also an important reminder of diversity within the Eurasian arena as a whole and of the dangers of overly unitary attempts to conceptualise it. The trading networks involved in mediating these connections, furthermore, act pragmatically within the nation-state system at the same time as cultivating collective identities that do not revolve around one-dimensional belonging to Afghanistan.