Rome takes Greece

I assume Rome at some point conquered Greece, or is that not true? When / how did Rome take on so many of the Grecian ideals and philosophies?

thanks
J

This will give you something of a time-line: http://www.btinternet.com/~brentours/ARCH02.htm

But Rome had been under Greek influence for a long time before it conquered it. Greek southern Italy and Greek influenced Etruria were there when Rome was just a fledgling.

Yeah that's a pretty good timeline. In a nutshell, like Matt says, Rome was influenced by Greek culture right from the start, as Greeks had colonized a lot of the Mediterranean when the Romans were still tribesmen living in swamps around the Tiber. Eventually (hundreds of years later) the Romans gained increasing power first conquering their neighboring Latin, Etruscan, and Greek colonial cities on the Italian mainland, and then branching out and conquering chunks of the wider Mediterranean proper. Through these "Punic Wars" with Carthage, Rome was able to co-opt areas for her own benefit which had been under Carthaginian dominion, or even areas which were simply allied with them (this proved a good excuse to flex their military muscle in Greece). And in the end, to answer your actual question, pretty much all of mainland Greece was annexed to Rome in one way or another by the middle of the second century BCE.

I highly recommend The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome by Erich Gruen. This magisterial work (I have the two-volume hardcover version) suggests that Rome didn't set out to conquer the Greek world as part of some kind of master plan but gradually got ever-more entangled there usually at the request of some weaker Greek kingdom seeking assistance against a stronger Greek kingdom, sending embassies to Rome pleading their case, and that Rome would send off some glory-seeking general or Senator who would win a (usually brutal) triumph. Rome didn't finally make Macedonia a colony until something like the third war they had with them. Pergamom was willed to Rome by the last of the Attalid dynasty.

Awesome, thanks all. Fascinating that Rome rose, ebbed and flowed, and finally skittered to a complete fall. Rather mind-blowing.

Old Times Roman (excellent play on a font name) has 275 (bc) Rome conquers the Greek colonies in southern mainland Italy

Yet a thousand years earlier Greece sacked Troy. A thousand years ... seems such a long period of time to actually be in existence as coherent culture with all the battling for dominance going on.

Chris469 -- I believe that is the current historical scholarship. At one point Rome even proclaimed "freedom of the Greeks" after whipping Macedon, but the ever warring Hellenes dragged Rome back in again and again until Rome finally found it easier to simply annex the whole thing.

Yet, many have said that long before Rome conquered Greece, it was Greece than conquered Rome -- the Hellenic and later Hellenistic culture was much admired and much emulated by the Romans, who seemed to have lacked even the imagination to create a coherant pantheon of deities, thus absorbing the Greek gods, with modifications ...

Are you suggesting that the invention of imaginary beings is the mark of superior civilization!?

I think it's rather that not even being able to come up with your own set shows a lack of imagination.

They did though, it's just almost impossible to retrieve archaic Roman religion from below the layers of Hellenic influence.

Speaking of layers…

I was in Rome a few weeks ago and we went down into the excavations below the Basilica of San Clemente, where in the 19th c. the Dominican monks uncovered a 4th c. temple. Below that was found a 1st c. Roman villa, and below that was found a small chapel dedicated to the worship of Mithra—a suggestion that there were other influences on Rome than just the Hellenes.

Certainly. Imperial Rome played host to just about every cult known to man at that time. Both Mythras and Isis seem to have been particullarly popular.

However, Mithras sanctuaries seem to have been placed underground on purpose - so that might mess up the archaeological stratification.

I think on this matter of the Romans 'absorbing' the Greek gods that it was more an idea of universalizing the gods; this tendency towards syncretic abstraction surely is the mark of a 'superior' civilization - a civilization happy with abstract ideas.

Yes. And I don’t think it’s accurate to say that ‘the Romans lacked imagination.’ Nor do I regard the invention of the Olympic pantheon as the apogee of Greek accomplishments. The considerations that motivated later philosophers and thinkers developed without reliance upon or reference to the works of Homer & Hesiod.

On 11:

I donʻt think the Romansʻ adoption/adaption of the Greek gods was "syncretic" or even "absorbtion".
The heaviest influence was Livius Andronicus (3r d c. B.C.) whose name shows him to be GRECO-Roman. In a translation of the Odysseye made the now well-known identifications like Hephaestos = Vulcan, Hermes = Mercury, Artemis = Diana. Only Zeus = Jupiter has any justification in Indo-European language derivation. (An important negative to note here is that Apollo was left without a "Roman" name.)
probably because it was too hard to find a local
deity who would provide even the kind of tenuous identification that Livius was giving.

The best 19th century translators of Homer, Lang, Leaf and Myers changed the usual "Ulysses" to "Odysseus", and the deitiesʻ names along with Odysseus were restored in English to their real Greek names. But use of the supposedly Roman names continued into the 20th century. Hence, we have a Ulysses, not an "Odysseus" by James Joyce, (although some translations say Odysseus). Eric A. Havelock with whom I had a course about 1953 w as one of the last to use the Roman names in English. So, in his The Crucifixion of Intellectual Man (= the English tr. of Aeschylusʻs Prometheus Bound), Hephaestos is Vulcan, Hermes Mercury, and Zeus (from the oblique cases of "Jupiter" is "Jove"!

Little is known about the real Mediterranean Vulcan, the Italic Mercury, Diana, and Neptune, but they were accepted by Romans and by those with a knowledge of Latin long after as the active deities of the Iliad and Odyssey. They werenʻt. But Roman deities tended to be forces, not personalities. "Venus" (equated with Aphrodite) is the closest Latin word to "Sex"
(in the sense of Madonnaʻs famous Sex (not sex as gender).

Zeus' origins are Indo-European, probably from the Caucasus, perhaps going back to the Euxine peoples prior to the Black Sea inundation event. He is similar to the Hittite Storm God as well as other deities from related societies. The Roman gods prior to the Greek "absorption" were not absent but neither were they well defined. It is perhaps unfair to consider that the Romans lacked imagination, but that is more or less how many of their contemporary ancients would have characterized it, especially the Greeks whom the Roman elite both disdained and emulated. In any event, while it is shocking to many of you I am sure, I am not a great admirer of Roman civilization and I find the best of it borrowed from the Hellenes they dominated.