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197 BC-AD 364 - Greece Under Rome

When Alexander was yet a young man, returning from his conquests in the far East, men must have anticipated, as very near, an empire not unlike that of Rome; for the conquest of the West would have been no difficult matter to Alexander, with all the resources of Asia under his hand. The successes of Pyrrhus, with his small army, against the adult Rome of the third century, fresh from her Samnite conquests, show what would have been the successes of Alexander, with his giant genius and armaments, against the younger and feebler republic. And if the realisation of the conqueror's dreams was hindered by his early death, most of the early Diadochi had each for many hard-fought years aspired to be his sole successor, hoping to complete his work and regenerate the distracted world by the potent influence of Hellenistic culture.

A world-empire, including all the lands and nations about the Mediterranean Sea, reaching to the frozen North and the torrid South as its natural limits, exchanging the virgin ores of Spain for the long-sought spices of Araby the blest, was therefore no very wild imagination. But while those that had conceived it and striven for it consciously had failed, who could have imagined that it should drop almost suddenly, unexpectedly, by the force, not of genius, but of circumstances, into the hands of a people who attained it, not by the direction of an Alexander, but by such national qualities as had gained for Sparta precedence and respect, coupled with aggressive wars under the guise of securing ever-widening frontiers, such as those which mark the rapid strides of Philip's Macedonia?

Any political thinker who witnessed this mighty outcome of half a century might indeed feel uneasy at the result, if he were not, like most of the Stoics, an optimist or a fatalist. There was, no doubt, the manifest gain of a great peace throughout the world, of the real settlement of disputes by the arbitration of an umpire with power to enforce his will; there was the consequent development of wide commerce, with its diffusion, not only of wealth, but of enlightenment. These material gains were indisputable, even though a dangerous monopoly was being established, not merely through the enormous advantages inseparable from Boman influence, but by the jealous destruction of all those commercial centres which might have rivalled Rome by reason of favoured situation or old traditions of trade.

Over a period of about 250 years, Greek territory gradually was incorporated into the Roman Empire. The Greek and Roman worlds each changed significantly because of the interaction that resulted. As the constant military conflicts of the Hellenistic kingdoms raised revenue needs, the tax burden on both rural and urban populations rose. Meanwhile, the Persians, Parthians, and Bactrians threatened from the east; and Roman expansionism in southern Italy and the western Mediterranean set the stage for repeated clashes between Rome and various Hellenistic rulers. The vibrancy, resilience, and resourcefulness of the Roman Republic finally proved to be too much for the fragile kingdoms of the East.

In the fourth and third centuries BC, military conquests in central Italy brought Rome into direct competition with the city colonies of Magna Graecia in southern Italy, especially Tarentum (Taranto) and Syracuse. In 280 B.C., Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, began a long period of confrontation between the Greeks and the Romans when he fought a series of battles against the Romans in southern Italy. In this period, however, Rome's major adversary in the Mediterranean was the powerful empire of Carthage, just across the Mediterranean in modern Tunisia, with which Rome fought the Punic Wars over period of forty-five years. Greek forces also became involved in the campaigns of the Punic Wars, setting the stage for future conflicts with Rome.

The most important episode occurred during the Second Punic War (218-207 BC). Campaigning in Italy, the Carthaginian leader Hannibal allied with Philip V of Macedonia, then the most powerful ruler in the Balkans, to protect supply lines from North Africa. Rome responded by supporting Philip's many enemies in the Balkans as they fought the First Macedonian War (215-213 BC), which expanded Roman interests into the Balkans. In the Second Macedonian War (200-197 BC), Rome's first major military expedition into the Greek world met with brilliant success.

The Athenians, the AEtolians, and others joined the Italian invader, who had come, they thought, to deliver them from the insolence of Macedon. The eyes of the world followed the movements of the Roman legion and the Macedonian phalanx, for now for the first time since Pyrrhus these two most efficient military systems of ancient times came into conflict. The phalanx was a solid body of bronze-clad warriors bristling with twenty-four-foot pikes; on level ground it was unconquerable, but among the hills it could be easily broken. The legion, on the contrary, was light and flexible, developed especially with a view to fighting the mountaineers of central Italy.

At Cynoscephalae — Dog's Heads — a low range of hills in Thessaly, the armies met, and after a sharp struggle the legion was victorious. This success was due not only to the Roman military organization, but quite as much to the nature of the ground, to the good generalship of Flamininus, and to the superiority of Roman soldiers over those of Greece. Flamininus compelled Philip to cede his Greek dependencies to Rome; then at the Isthmian games in the following spring, amid the rejoicing of the multitude, the consul proclaimed all these states free, and assured to Greece the protection of the Western Republic. Some of the liberated states joined the yEtolian League, others the Achaean. In this struggle the Romans had proved themselves the champions of freedom against a despot. Flamininus established a Roman protectorate over the "liberated" Greek city-states. The fortunes of Greece and Rome were henceforth intertwined for about the next 500 years.

Hostilities broke out again between Rome and Macedon, now under Perseus, son of Philip V. In Macedon, the fourth year of the war Lucius AEmilius Paullus, a Roman of great ability and of noble character, took the field and defeated Perseus at Pydna. The last of the Macedonian kings, carried a prisoner to Rome, followed in the triumphal procession of the conqueror. Macedon, at first divided into four republics under the protectorate of Rome, finally became a Roman province in 146 BC.

The end of Hellenic freedom was drawing near. When the quarrels of the Greeks again brought a Roman army among them, Mummius, the commander, following the instructions given him by the senate, destroyed Corinth, 146 B.c. killed most of the men he captured, and sold the women and children into slavery. As the beautiful city, stripped of her wealth and her art, sank into ruin, the Greeks at length realized that while they still retained the form of liberty, the Roman senate was their master.

Though compelled to submit to Rome, Greece through her arts led the conqueror captive and made him the bearer of her civilization to the nations of the West. The final incorporation of Greece and the Greek East into the Roman Empire came in 31 BC after the Battle of Actium, on the western shore of Greece. There, rule of the Roman Empire was settled when the Roman emperor Octavian defeated the navy of Mark Antony. Because Antony had based his land forces in Greece, the victory of Caesar Augustus made the Greek world an integral and permanent part of the Roman Empire. The yoke of empire on Greece was relatively light, however, and many Greek cities approved the new order. Rome demanded only two things from its Greek holdings-- security and revenue.

The period from 31 BC until the death of Marcus Aurelius in AD 180 is often referred to as the era of the Pax Romana, or Roman Peace--a phenomenon that actually occurred only in the central areas of the empire, including Greece and the Greek East. The peace and security of the first two centuries AD promoted a cultural flowering and economic growth in the Greek world, as well as integration of Greeks into the ruling elite of the empire.

Peninsular Greece was divided into two provinces: Achaia, incorporating central and southern Greece, and Macedonia, which included Thessaly, Epirus, and Macedonia proper. Because these provinces were not required to support Roman occupation forces, their fiscal burdens were relatively modest. Greek cities became the financial, economic, and administrative core of the eastern reaches of the empire. The first result of this role was economic growth and prosperity--Greek cities like Athens, Corinth, Alexandria, Miletus, Thessaloniki, and Smyrna flourished as both producers and commercial centers. From this settled prosperity, an urban Greek elite arose.

Decentralized Roman provincial administration created spaces for local men to rise in power and status, and, beginning with the reign of Emperor Vespasian (AD 69-78), significant numbers of Greeks even entered the Roman Senate. At the same time, life in Greek cities incorporated Roman features, and new generations of "Romanized" Greek citizens appeared. An example of such new Greek citizens was Herodes Atticus, a fabulously wealthy financier and landowner from Athens, who rose to be consul of Rome in AD 143, and whose bequests still adorn his home city.

On the other hand, several Roman emperors such as Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius actively embraced Greek culture and traditions, encouraging the hellenization of Roman culture. Together, Latin and Greek became the dominant languages of the empire. Literature, art, oratory, rhetoric, education, and architecture all drew on Hellenic roots from the age of the Greek polis. During the Pax Romana, Greece and Greek culture were a vital part of the Roman Empire.

By the second century AD, Christianity and Hellenism had come into close contact in the eastern Mediterranean. In the early fourth century, the policies of Emperor Constantine the Great institutionalized the connection and lent a lasting Greek influence to the church that emerged. Although Christianity was initially practiced within Semitic populations of the Roman Empire, by the first century AD Greeks also had learned of the teachings of Christ. In that period, the epistles of Paul to the Ephesians and the Corinthians and his preachings to the Athenians were all aimed at a Greek audience. Other early Christian theological writers such as Clement of Alexandria and Origen attempted to fuse Christian belief with Greek philosophy, establishing the Greek world as the home of gentile Christianity.

In 330 Constantine advanced the separation of the eastern and western empires by establishing his capital at Byzantium and renaming it Constantinople. In 364 the empire was officially split. The western empire was to be ruled from Rome, the eastern from Constantinople. For those in the eastern territory that had been dominated by the tradition of the polis, the transition from a Latin Roman empire to a Greek Byzantine empire was an easy one. Constantinople inherited the cultural wealth of the Greek citystate as a solid foundation and a symbol of civilization in its empire.