Greece in the Roman era

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Greece in the Roman era describes the Roman conquest of the territory of the modern nation-state of

Kingdom of Macedon in a series of conflicts known as the Macedonian Wars. The Fourth Macedonian War ended at the Battle of Pydna in 148 BC with the defeat of the Macedonian royal pretender Andriscus
.

The definitive Roman occupation of the Greek world was established after the

Hellenistic Egypt.[5] The Roman era of Greek history continued with Emperor Constantine the Great's adoption of Byzantium as Nova Roma, the capital city of the Roman Empire; in 330 AD, the city was renamed Constantinople
. Afterwards, the Byzantine Empire was the Eastern Roman Empire, including Greek and Roman culture.

Roman Republic

The Roman conquest of Ancient Greece in the 2nd century BC

The

Greek peninsula fell to the Roman Republic during the Battle of Corinth (146 BC), when Macedonia became a Roman province. Meanwhile, southern Greece also came under Roman hegemony, but some key Greek poleis
remained partly autonomous and avoided direct Roman taxation.

In 88 BC,

Achaea, in 27 BC. Initially, Rome's conquest of Greece damaged the economy
, but it readily recovered under Roman administration in the postwar period. Moreover, the Greek cities in Asia Minor recovered from the Roman conquest more rapidly than the cities of peninsular Greece, which had been much damaged in the war with Sulla.

As an empire, Rome invested resources and rebuilt the cities of Roman Greece, and established Corinth as the capital city of the province of Achaea, and Athens prospered as a cultural hub of philosophy, education and learned knowledge.

Early Roman Empire

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Life in Greece continued under the Roman Empire much the same as it had previously. Roman culture was highly influenced by the Greeks; as Horace said, Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit ("Captive Greece captured her rude conqueror").[6] The epics of Homer inspired the Aeneid of Virgil, and authors such as Seneca the Younger wrote using Greek styles. Some Roman nobles regarded the Greeks as backwards and petty, but many others embraced Greek literature and philosophy. The Greek language became a favorite of the educated and elite in Rome, such as Scipio Africanus, who tended to study philosophy and regarded Greek culture and science as an example to be followed.

The

Roman Emperor Nero visited Greece in 66 AD, and performed at the Ancient Olympic Games, despite the rules against non-Greek participation. He was honoured with a victory in every contest, and in the following year, he proclaimed the freedom of the Greeks at the Isthmian Games in Corinth, just as Flamininus
had over 200 years previously.

Many temples and public buildings were built in Greece by emperors and wealthy Roman nobility, especially in Athens.

Ancient Agora
.

The Pax Romana was the longest period of peace in Greek history, and Greece became a major crossroads of maritime trade between Rome and the Greek speaking eastern half of the empire. The Greek language served as a lingua franca in the eastern provinces and in Italy, and many Greek intellectuals such as Galen would perform most of their work in Rome.

During this time, Greece and much of the rest of the Roman east came under the influence of

of Tarsus preached in Philippi
, Corinth and Athens, and Greece soon became one of the most highly Christianized areas of the empire.

Later Roman Empire

Further information: Byzantine Greece

During the 2nd and 3rd centuries, Greece was divided into provinces including

Insulae in the Diocese of Asia
.

Greece faced invasions from the

advent of the Arabs
.

Greece remained part of and became the center of the remaining relatively cohesive and robust eastern half of the Roman Empire, the

Fall of Rome
, the city which once conquered it.

Contrary to outdated visions of

Mediterranean.[7]

The Roman emperor Heraclius in the early 7th century changed the empire’s official language from Latin to Greek. As the eastern half of the Mediterranean has always been predominantly Greek, the eastern half of the Roman Empire gradually became Hellenized following the fall of the Latin western half. Over the course of the following centuries, mainland Greece was mainly contested between the Roman and Bulgarian Empires, and suffered from invasions by Slavic tribes and Normans. Crete and Cyprus were contested between the Romans and Arabs and were later taken by the Crusaders who, following the Sack of Constantinople in 1204, established the Latin Empire in Thrace and Greece. The Romans retook Constantinople and re-established control in most of the Greek peninsula, although Epirus would remain an independent splinter state until the early 14th century when Roman control was re-established. As a civil war raged within the empire, the Serbian Empire took the opportunity to conquer most of mainland Greece, while a resurgent Bulgarian Empire invaded from the north. In the century that followed, the Ottoman Empire would establish its dominance in the region, annexing all three empires and finishing its conquest of Greece with the fall of the Morea in 1460.

References

  1. OCLC 813628501
    .
  2. OCLC 972308960
    .
  3. ISBN 978-1-78076-593-8
    , retrieved 2021-07-11
  4. OCLC 1189729109
    .
  5. ^ Hellenistic Age. Encyclopædia Britannica. 2013. Retrieved 27 May 2013. Archived 14 May 2013.
  6. ^ "Horace – Wikiquote". en.wikiquote.org. Retrieved 2018-04-27.
  7. ^ a b c Rothaus, p. 10. "The question of the continuity of civic institutions and the nature of the polis in the late antique and early Byzantine world have become a vexed question, for a variety of reasons. Students of this subject continue to contend with scholars of earlier periods who adhere to a much-outdated vision of late antiquity as a decadent decline into impoverished fragmentation. The cities of late-antique Greece displayed a marked degree of continuity. Scenarios of barbarian destruction, civic decay, and manorialization simply do not fit. In fact, the city as an institution appears to have prospered in Greece during this period. It was not until the end of the 6th century (and maybe not even then) that the dissolution of the city became a problem in Greece. If the early 6th century Syndekmos of Hierocles is taken at face value, late-antique Greece was highly urbanized and contained approximately eighty cities. This extreme prosperity is born out by recent archaeological surveys in the Aegean. For late-antique Greece, a paradigm of prosperity and transformation is more accurate and useful than a paradigm of decline and fall."

Sources

External links
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