It is commonly thought that the Greeks and Romans existed and dominated the Mediterranean as partner civilisations, that they formed somehow a cohesive whole of ‘Greco-Roman civilisation’. This was true, no doubt, but only under the Roman Empire, and this image of classical civilisation, marked by the ancient colonnaded temple ruins of today, and the reputation for conceiving such fundamental Western institutions as democracy, philosophy, liberty, history and literature (to name but a few), overlooks the particular historical events, and distinct cultural traits, that distinguished the rises and acmes of Greek and Roman civilisation. Ultimately, there were differences in the political histories of the two that saw the formation of the Roman Empire, and not a Greek one, in the 1st century AD.
Differences in Ancient Greek and Roman Early History: The Story of the City-State and a City
Just a cursory glance at the histories of classical Greece and Rome provide one with an idea of the differing periods of growth and flourishment between the two. They were both the heirs of the Indo-Europeans, but the Greeks settled in the Balkan peninsula, the Romans in the Italian. The Greeks, moreover, were stationed at a crucial crossroads between the tribalistic cultures of ancient eastern Europe, and the developed and cultured civilisations of Mesopotamia and Anatolia, such as the Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, and later the Phoenicians, Egyptians, and Persians. The Romans, on the other hand, were geographically more isolated and centred in the western Mediterranean, and trace their origins to the Latinate, Oscan and Umbrian peoples of the Italian peninsula.
The Greeks, over their long history before the onset of the Romans, were at first a civilisation of cities. The so-called age of colonisation, roughly 700-500 BC, in which numerous Hellenic (while there was little conception in antiquity of a unified people known as the ‘Greeks’) peoples travelled across the Mediterranean, from the Black Sea and the mouth of the Nile in the east to the southern regions of Italy, southern France, Sicily and even Spain to found new cities. Rome, however, as much as Italy, with its myriad Etruscan, Latin, and Umbrian peoples had their many cities and towns, was but the one settlement.
Differing Fortunes in the 5th-4th centuries: Ancient Greek cities flourish, Rome is Sacked
The history of ancient Greece, then, was marked by hegemonies (periods of dominance) and periodic supremacies, such as those of Athens, Sparta, and Thebes in the fifth and fourth centuries, and of Syracuse in Sicily. Much of this development was spurred on by the triumph of Hellenism in the military conflicts with the Persians in the east, and Carthaginians in the west, at the start of the fifth century. For the next century and a half, Greek history was marked by the city-state, and its golden age.
In Italy, on the contrary, Rome had a tougher time of it. Her fifth and fourth centuries were marked by difficult wars with neighbouring tribes, culminating in a debilitating sack of the city by the Gauls in 390 BC. She formed the Latin League with the nearby towns, encouraging a system of enhanced confederacy, of which she was the supreme head. Greek Syracuse had come the closest to this, under Dionysius I in the 4th century. Thus, as Athens, Sparta, and other warring Greek states waged the Peloponnesian War, and were drowned in successive hegemonies up to the rise of Macedon, Rome slowly built a presence in Italy almost entirely centred on the city herself.
The Rise of Greek and Roman Civilisations to Prominence in the Mediterranean
The Greek city-states, ultimately, succumbed to the new trend in the late fourth century, of the powerful and consuming mega-state, the kingdom. Macedon, her powerful northern neighbour, had found a vigorous leader in Phillip II and Alexander, and would rise to overcome the divisions into which the Greek cities had descended. At the fateful battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC, Phillip II defeated a Greek coalition, and formed the Corinthian League (a sort of ancient United Nations), which ironically paved the way for Greek civilisation’s most glorious epoch. It had found its most powerful proponent in Alexander, the son of Phillip. Under his aegis the Greeks and Macedonians conquered their powerful eastern neighbour the Persians, and instituted a new era – the Hellenistic – in world history.
Rome, by the death of Alexander, had grown powerful enough to excite a legend of it having sent an embassy to the great Alexander at Babylon. Rome was still fighting in Italy, however, but her moment of propulsion to world greatness was soon to come. In her wars with her neighbour Carthage, she achieved what the western Greeks never managed to do – conquer the other great relic of the Orient. As the Macedonians had aided in the victory over Persia, so Rome, in defeating Carthage over the third and second centuries (in three epic conflicts known as the Punic Wars established her pre-eminence in the western Mediterranean.
The Triumph of the Greek and Roman Civilisations: The Hellenistic Kingdoms and Rome
One comes to the epoch, from the third to first centuries, when the fortunes and storied histories of these two civilisations, Rome and Greece, finally weave themselves into the fabric of the Greco-Roman world. In the east the post-Alexandrian kingdoms, known by modern scholars as the Hellenistic kingdoms, dominated the Levant and Middle East – the Antigonid Macedonian, Seleucid Syrian, and Ptolemaic Egyptian – albeit through the fabric of an extended Macedonian monarchy imposed on the existing provincial governmental framework of the Persian empire, and the feudal political system inherited from the ancient Mesopotamian empires. It led inevitably to unsustainable conflicts between the kingdoms, and within the kingdoms, which led to the formation of smaller realms (that of Pergamum or Bithynia, for instance), and their structural weakening.
In the west, however, Rome seemed to develop a political system that encouraged growth and expansion, with a local emphasis on the attainment of military honours, as well as a sustainable system of provincial governors (proconsuls and propraetors) that precluded an unwise over-exertion of her military resources. Thus, as the Greeks were embroiled in wars among each other, Rome slowly made progress in her expansion in Spain, north Africa, and ultimately in Greece and the Hellenistic kingdoms themselves.
When the might of Rome finally met that of the Greeks, in successive battles at Magnesia (189 BC) against the Seleucids, or at Cynocephalae (167 BC), which saw the demise of the Macedonian kingdom, it was the clash of two fates long in the making. In the end the Greeks, from a political and military perspective, were the losers. One by one, the Romans consumed the once mighty heirs to Alexander, and launched her own new pan-Mediterranean imperial enterprise.
The Ancient Greeks and Romans United: The Formation of Greco-Roman Civilisation
At the end of it, however, Rome may have gained an empire, but the Greeks, by being thereby conquered, gained a protector who could overlook the continuation and perpetuation of her cultural legacy. This essay has been much about the political histories of the Romans and Greeks, but perhaps some part of it can be due to the differing mentalities and cultural constitutions of the two civilisations – one militaristic and institutionally innovative, the other cultured and self-righteous. In the end, the Roman poet Horace’s famous dictum, that ‘Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit’ (Conquered Greece captivated her wild conqueror) proved to be true. We remember Plato and Aristotle, or Homer and Thucydides, only because they were read by enchanted Romans, and in some cases imitated by them (as with Vergil and Sallust in the latter regard). Only with the security of the Roman political fabric could Greco-Roman civilisation, and a second flourishment of Greek letters under the empire be ensured, and its reputation to this day, be preserved.
Marcus Chin - I write about various things, and in the main out of that simple human emotion - interest and, correspondingly, passion. Knowledge stems ...
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