Roman Greece & the Byzantine World

1. The Roman Conquest of Greece (197–146 BC)

Rome’s involvement in Greece came as the unintended result of its wars with Carthage (the Punic Wars) and the ambitions of the Hellenistic kings. In 200 BC, after defeating Hannibal, Rome intervened in the east, and in 197 BC the Roman army under Titus Quinctius Flamininus crushed Philip V of Macedon at the Battle of Cynoscephalae. At the Isthmian Games of 196 BC, Flamininus dramatically proclaimed the "freedom" of the Greek states from Macedonian rule — an act that won him adulation, though in practice it announced rather than abolished Roman domination. Rome then turned on Philip’s ally and rival kings: it defeated the Seleucid Antiochus III at Thermopylae (191 BC) and Magnesia (190 BC), and, after a Macedonian resurgence, destroyed the Antigonid kingdom of Macedon at Pydna in 168 BC, where King Perseus was defeated and captured. The kingdom of Macedon was abolished and divided.

The final subjugation came with the uprising of the Achaean League, the federation of Peloponnesian cities, against Rome. It was ruthlessly crushed, and in 146 BC the Roman general Lucius Mummius sacked Corinth, the league’s chief city — burning it and selling its inhabitants into slavery, and sending its famous artworks to Rome. Corinth was destroyed as a warning, and the whole of Greece, organised as the province of Achaea, passed under direct Roman rule. With the fall of Corinth and the later end of the last Hellenistic kingdom (Egypt, conquered by Octavian in 30 BC after Actium), the political independence of Greece was at an end forever (World History Encyclopedia, "Corinth," worldhistory.org/Corinth/).

2. Greece as a Roman Province

Under Rome, southern Greece formed the province of Achaea (with its capital at Corinth, refounded as a Roman colony by Julius Caesar in 44 BC), while the north lay within Macedonia and Epirus. The Romans, who admired Greek civilisation, generally treated the Greeks as a conquered but culturally superior people: Roman poets, orators and nobles studied Greek, Greek teachers and physicians came to Rome as the educated class of the empire, and Greek cities such as Athens, Sparta and Ephesus were left to manage their local affairs with their own laws. The emperor Augustus (r. 27 BC–AD 14) actively patronised and rebuilt Athens and the rest. Greek became the common language of the eastern empire, and the "Hellenistic" fusion of Greek and eastern culture continued to flourish under Roman rule.

The imperial period was, for many Greek cities, a time of renewed prosperity and of intense cultural pride — an age sometimes called the "Second Sophistic," when Greek orators and writers celebrated their Hellenic inheritance and its supposed superiority to the (culturally Greek-speaking) Romans. It was also the age that produced some of the greatest of all Greek literary and scientific figures — the biographer Plutarch (c. AD 46–120, author of the Parallel Lives), the geographer Strabo, the satirist Lucian, the physician Galen of Pergamon (AD 129–c. 216), the astronomer Ptolemy of Alexandria (c. AD 100–170), and the historian Cassius Dio. Roman Greece was a centre of learning second only to Rome itself — and, increasingly, its equal.

3. Christianity and the New Testament World

Greece played a central role in the birth and spread of Christianity. The New Testament was written in Greek; the apostle Paul of Tarsus preached across Greece, at Philippi, Thessalonica, Beroea, Athens (where he addressed the philosophers on the Areopagus) and for eighteen months in Corinth (c. AD 51–52), founding the Christian community to which his surviving letters to the Corinthians and Thessalonians are addressed. Christianity grew in the Greek-speaking cities of the eastern empire, and from the third century it increasingly drew the intellectual energy that pagan Greek philosophy had once claimed. By the reign of the emperor Constantine in the early fourth century AD, Christianity had become the central religion of the empire, and the Greek east its heartland (World History Encyclopedia, "Paul the Apostle," worldhistory.org/Saint_Paul/).

4. Constantinople — The New Rome (AD 324–330)

In AD 324, after reuniting the Roman Empire, the emperor Constantine I chose to found a new imperial capital on the site of the ancient Greek colony of Byzantium, at the strategic crossroads of Europe and Asia on the Bosporus. Rebuilt on a massive scale and dedicated in AD 330 as Constantinople ("Constantine’s city," the "New Rome"), it was designed from the start as a Christian capital. Its site — ringed by water, fronting the sheltered harbour of the Golden Horn, and commanding the sea routes between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea — made it the most defensible and economically dominant city of the age. Constantine lavished on it the treasures and monuments of the classical world, including obelisks, statues of the gods turned to Christian heroes, and a vast new forum and hippodrome for chariot-racing. Constantinople would remain for over a thousand years the wealthiest and greatest city of Christendom (World History Encyclopedia, "Constantinople," worldhistory.org/Constantinople/).

5. The Byzantine Age — Greek Rome in the East (AD 395–1453)

When the Roman Empire was formally divided after Theodosius I (AD 395), the eastern half — Greek-speaking, Christian, centred on Constantinople — survived while the western half collapsed in the fifth century (Rome itself was sacked by the Visigoths in 410 and the western throne ended in 476). The eastern empire, which modern historians call the Byzantine Empire but which always called itself Roman, was the direct heir of both Greece and Rome. Its official language became Greek, its culture and religion were Greek Orthodoxy, and its emperors styled themselves "Emperor of the Romans." It preserved and copied the literature, philosophy and science of classical Greece, adding its own achievements in law (the Code of Justinian), architecture (the Hagia Sophia, rebuilt under Justinian I in 532–537), military technology (the incendiary weapon "Greek fire", used from the 7th century) and Orthodox Christian theology and art (World History Encyclopedia, "Byzantine Empire," worldhistory.org/Byzantine_Empire/).

For a millennium Byzantium was the guardian of Greek learning — the very texts of ancient Greece that reached Renaissance Italy did so, in large part, through Byzantine scholars who fled to the West in the empire’s final centuries. Byzantium itself was repeatedly attacked, from the Persian and Arab conquests of the seventh century, through the crusades (its sack by the Fourth Crusade in 1204 was a blow from which it never recovered), to the steady advance of the Ottoman Turks.

6. The Fall of Constantinople (29 May 1453) — The End of the Greek World

The long history of the Greek world found its final act on 29 May 1453, when the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II ("the Conqueror") captured Constantinople after a fifty-three-day siege, breaching the great Theodosian Walls with massive cannons — among the largest ever built — and overwhelming the outnumbered Byzantine defenders under the last emperor, Constantine XI Palaeologus, who died fighting in the breach. The city was sacked, the Hagia Sophia converted into a mosque, and the Byzantine Empire, the last direct heir of the Roman state, came to an end, with Greece itself falling under Ottoman rule for nearly four centuries (until Greek independence in 1830). Yet even in defeat the Greek inheritance was not extinguished: the Greek language, the Orthodox faith, and the ancient learning survived — carried westward by Byzantine refugees into Renaissance Europe and preserved within the Greek people themselves — to shape the modern world (World History Encyclopedia, "Constantinople," worldhistory.org/Constantinople/).

6b. The Second Sophistic — Greek Culture Under the Roman Empire

Far from withering under Roman rule, Greek culture experienced a brilliant renewal in the first to third centuries AD — a period modern scholars call the Second Sophistic. Wealthy and articulate Greek orators and writers travelled the empire delivering elaborate display speeches (epideixeis), celebrating their Hellenic heritage and, often subtly, asserting the superiority of Greek culture over their Roman rulers. The age produced some of the greatest literary figures of antiquity: the historian and biographer Plutarch of Chaeronea (c. AD 46–120), whose Parallel Lives paired Greek and Roman statesmen and whose essays shaped European thought for centuries; Lucian of Samosata, the witty satirist of the second century; Aelius Aristides, the orator who celebrated the Roman peace in his Panathenaic Oration and Roman Oration; and, at the highest level of professional skill, the doctors and teachers of the schools of medicine and rhetoric who made the eastern cities (Athens, Smyrna, Ephesus, Pergamon) centres of education. The emperor Hadrian himself was a devoted Hellenist, and his rivals and successors cultivated Greek learning. Athens was rebuilt and adorned with the Library of Hadrian and the Temple of Olympian Zeus; the great sanctuary of Delphi and Epidaurus flourished; and the Greek agonistic (athletic) festivals, revived by the emperors, kept alive the old panhellenic ideal. It was out of this vigorous, Greek-speaking, Roman-governed world — where the New Testament was written, the apostles preached, and the church grew — that Byzantine civilisation would be born (World History Encyclopedia, "Second Sophistic," worldhistory.org/Second_Sophistic/).

6c. Greek Science and Learning Under Roman Patronage

Roman rule did not end Greek science; rather, the Roman peace (the Pax Romana) spread it and gave it new patrons. The great Greek physicians and astronomers of the Roman age worked throughout the empire, often for Roman patrons and readers: Dioscorides of Anazarba (fl. c. AD 60–70) compiled the Materia Medica, the standard pharmacological text for fifteen centuries; Galen of Pergamon (AD 129–c. 216), physician to the emperors in Rome and the most influential doctor of antiquity, synthesised Greek medicine into a system that dominated medicine until the Renaissance, and compiled the medical encyclopaedia whose authority was unchallenged for over a millennium; and Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria (c. AD 100–170) wrote the Almagest, the definitive geocentric astronomy, and the Geography, perfecting the map-grid of latitude and longitude that guided navigators and scholars for centuries. In mathematics, Pappus of Alexandria (c. AD 290–350) compiled the great Collection; and the traditional of commentary and compilation — the scholia on the earlier masters — preserved the learning of antiquity. The physician-writers, astronomers and mathematicians of Roman Greece thus carried the Greek scientific tradition forward, and their works, translated into Arabic and then Latin, became the backbone of medieval and Renaissance science. Through them, the Greek intellectual inheritance did not perish with the political Greek world but was handed down to Byzantium, the Islamic world and, finally, the West (World History Encyclopedia, "Greek Medicine," worldhistory.org/Greek_Medicine/).

6d. The Preservation and Transmission of Greek Literature

The survival of ancient Greek literature to the present day is itself a story of Roman and Byzantine Greece. The texts we read today — Homer, the tragedians, Plato, Aristotle, the historians — survived because they were continually copied and studied through the Roman and Byzantine periods, first on papyrus scrolls and then, from about the 4th century AD, in codex (bound book) form. In the great libraries of Alexandria, Rome, Constantinople and Athens, grammarians and commentators (the scholiasts) preserved and annotated them; in the schools and universities of the eastern empire, rhetoricians taught the classical canon as the foundation of Greek (and then Byzantine) education; and Byzantine scholars — men such as Photius (c. 810–893), whose Bibliotheca summarised hundreds of ancient books, some now lost — catalogued and safeguarded the heritage. When, in the 14th and 15th centuries, Byzantium crumbled, fleeing Greek scholars carried manuscripts to Italy, where they fuelled the Renaissance — the revival of ancient learning that transformed Europe. Thus the tragedy of 1453 was not the end of Greek literature but the beginning of its renewed influence: in the West, Greek was relearned, the classics were printed, and the civilisation founded by the Bronze Age Greeks and transmitted through Roman and Byzantine centuries entered the mainstream of modern culture (World History Encyclopedia, "Byzantine Empire," worldhistory.org/Byzantine_Empire/).

7. Selected Sources & Further Reading

These walls are our Alexander. In them shall we find the strength to resist all the forces of the East.— Byzantine saying at the siege of Constantinople (mod. trans.)