[146 BCE - 330 CE] Roman Greece

The year is 146 BCE, and the air over Corinth is thick with the metallic tang of blood and the acrid smoke of ruin. The great commercial city, a jewel of the Achaean League, is a smoldering corpse. Roman legions, under the command of the consul Lucius Mummius, have made a terrifying example of it. Its men are slaughtered, its women and children sold into slavery, its priceless art and treasures plundered and shipped back to Rome. This is not a negotiation. It is a brutal, bloody punctuation mark at the end of Greek independence. For nearly five centuries, Greece—the land of philosophers, playwrights, and citizen-soldiers—is now a territory of Rome. But this is not a simple story of a conqueror and the conquered. What unfolds over the next 476 years is one of history's most fascinating and complex cultural duels. Rome may have conquered Greece with the sword, but Greece would, in turn, conquer Rome with its spirit. In the first century of Roman rule, the land was exhausted. Decades of internal conflict, followed by the Mithridatic Wars where many Greek cities disastrously backed the wrong side against Rome, left scars. The Roman general Sulla, in 86 BCE, inflicted another wound, sacking Athens itself, a city that had until then been largely spared. He plundered the city, torched the port of Piraeus, and famously stripped half of the ivory from the colossal statue of Athena in the Parthenon. Imagine the psychological blow: the goddess of wisdom herself, defaced by the new masters of the world. Yet, even as Roman governors and tax collectors arrived, something else was happening. The Roman elite, for all their military prowess, were utterly captivated by Greece. They saw it not as a backwater province, but as the wellspring of all true culture. Horace, the Roman poet, would later write the famous line, "Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit" — "Captive Greece took its brutish conqueror captive." It was the absolute truth. Wealthy Romans sent their sons to be educated in the philosophical schools of Athens, just as the wealthy of today might send their children to a prestigious foreign university. The great orator Cicero perfected his rhetoric there. A Roman household of any standing was incomplete without a Greek tutor for the children, a Greek physician, and Greek art in the courtyard. Greek slaves, prized for their education and skills, could wield immense influence within Roman families. Life for the average Greek, however, was a more grounded affair. In the bustling marketplace, or *agora*, of a city like Athens or Corinth (which was rebuilt by Julius Caesar in 44 BCE as a Roman colony), the sounds would have been a mix of Koine Greek, the common language of the East, and the clipped Latin of officials and soldiers. A farmer from Attica, dressed in a simple woollen tunic, or *chiton*, would haggle over the price of his olives, his cart parked near a grand new basilica built with Roman concrete and arches. He might gaze up at the ancient Parthenon, a familiar symbol of a glorious past, while just down the way, workers were finishing a temple to the Emperor, a symbol of the unassailable present. Under the stability of the *Pax Romana*—the Roman Peace—established by the Emperor Augustus around 27 BCE, Greece began to heal and even prosper. Augustus organized the region into the province of Achaea, governed not by a military legion, but by a senator from Rome. It was a sign of its perceived pacification. The infamous Roman road network, a marvel of engineering, expanded here. The Via Egnatia, a paved superhighway stretching across northern Greece, became a vibrant, humming artery of trade and military movement, connecting the Adriatic to the Aegean. For the first time in centuries, travel was relatively safe. A merchant could journey from Patras to Thessaloniki with a reasonable expectation of not being accosted by bandits. The true golden age of Roman Greece, however, arrived in the 2nd century CE with the Emperor Hadrian. Here was a Roman Emperor who was more than an admirer of Greece; he was a fanatic, a true Philhellene. Bearded in the style of the Greek philosophers, he lavished attention and immense funds upon the province. In Athens, his legacy is still etched in stone. He completed the colossal Temple of Olympian Zeus, a project that had languished for over 600 years. Its 104 marble columns, each 17 meters high, were a staggering sight, a fusion of Greek ambition and Roman engineering might. He built a grand library, a new aqueduct that gave Athens a reliable water supply for the first time in its history, and the famous Arch of Hadrian. On the side facing the old city, the inscription reads, "This is Athens, the ancient city of Theseus." On the side facing the new quarter he built, it states, "This is the city of Hadrian, and not of Theseus." The message was clear: a new chapter had begun, written by Rome. But as the centuries wore on, another, quieter force began to move through these ancient lands. It wasn't an army or an emperor, but an idea. A Jewish preacher from Tarsus named Paul, a Roman citizen himself, traveled through the cities of Greece around 50 CE. In the rebuilt, cosmopolitan Corinth, he spoke to dockworkers and merchants about a new faith, Christianity. In Athens, he stood on the Areopagus, or Mars Hill, in the shadow of the Acropolis, and debated with Stoic and Epicurean philosophers about their "unknown god." For most, this new cult was a strange, eastern superstition. But the message found fertile ground in the spiritual vacuum of the age. The old gods—Zeus, Apollo, Athena—were still officially worshipped, their festivals celebrated, but for many, they had become civic traditions more than objects of fervent belief. This new faith, with its promise of personal salvation and a direct relationship with the divine, offered something new. The slow, inexorable tide of this new faith began to rise, lapping at the foundations of the classical world. By the turn of the 4th century, the Roman Empire itself was in transformation. It was too vast, too unwieldy. The center of power was drifting east. And in 330 CE, the Emperor Constantine, the first Christian emperor, made a monumental decision. He founded a new capital, a "New Rome," on the site of the old Greek town of Byzantium. He named it Constantinople. With this act, the chapter of Roman Greece comes to a close. The focus of the Roman world was no longer Italy, but the Bosphorus strait, on the very edge of Greece. A new, Greek-speaking, Christian Roman Empire—what we now call the Byzantine Empire—was about to be born, rising from the magnificent, complicated, and enduring legacy of its Greco-Roman parentage.