From the Death of Alexander the Great to the Conquest of Greece by the Romans

Expansion brought Rome into contact with many diverse cultures. The most important of these was the Greek culture in the eastern Mediterranean with its highly refined literature and learning. Rome responded to it with ambivalence: although Greek doctrina was attractive, it was also the culture of the defeated and enslaved. Indeed, much Greek culture was brought to Rome in the aftermath of military victories, as Roman soldiers returned home not only with works of art but also with learned Greeks who had been enslaved. Despite the ambivalence, nearly every facet of Roman culture was influenced by the Greeks, and it was a Greco-Roman culture that the Roman empire bequeathed to later European civilization.

As Roman aristocrats encountered Greeks in southern Italy and in the East in the 3rd century, they learned to speak and write in Greek. Scipio Africanus and Flamininus, for example, are known to have corresponded in Greek. By the late republic it became standard for senators to be bilingual. Many were reared from infancy by Greek-speaking slaves and later tutored by Greek slaves or freedmen. Nonetheless, despite their increasing fluency in Greek, senators continued to insist on Latin as the official language of government; visiting dignitaries from the East addressing the Senate in Greek had their speeches translated--as a mark of their subordination.

Because Greek was the lingua franca of the East, Romans had to use Greek if they wished to reach a wider audience. Thus the first histories by Romans were written in Greek. The patrician Fabius Pictor, who, as noted above, founded the Roman tradition of historiography during the Second Punic War, wrote his annalistic history of Rome in Greek partly in order to influence Greek views in favour of Rome, and he emphasized Rome's ancient ties to the Greek world by incorporating in his history the legend that the Trojan hero Aeneas had settled in Latium. Because Roman history was about politics and war, the writing of history was always judged by Romans to be a suitable pastime for men of politics--i.e., for senators such as Fabius.

Rome had had a folk tradition of poetry in the native Saturnian verse with a metre based on stress, but not a formal literature. Lucius Livius Andronicus was regarded as the father of Latin literature, a fact that illustrates to what extent the development of Roman literature was bound up with conquest and enslavement. Livius, a native Greek speaker from Tarentum, was brought as a slave to Rome, where he remained until his death (c. 204). Becoming fluent in Latin, he translated the Homeric Odyssey into Latin in Saturnian verse. Thus Latin literature began with a translation from Greek into the native metre. Livius reached wider audiences through his translations of Greek plays for public performance. Gnaeus Naevius, the next major figure (c. 270-c. 201), was again not a native Roman but an Oscan speaker from Campania. In addition to translating Greek drama, he wrote the first major original work in Latin, an epic poem about the First Punic War. Naevius' successors, Quintus Ennius from Calabria (239-169) and Titus Maccius Plautus from Umbria (c. 254-184), transformed the Latin poetic genres by importing Greek metrical forms based on the length of syllables rather than on stress. Ennius was best known for his epic history of Rome in verse, the Annales, but he also wrote tragedies and satires. Plautus produced comedies adapted from Greek New Comedy. He is the only early author whose work is well represented in the corpus of surviving literature (21 plays judged authentic by Marcus Terentius Varro, Rome's greatest scholar). None of the plays of his younger contemporaries, Caecilius Statius (c. 210-168) and Marcus Pacuvius (c. 220-130), survive, nor do the once highly esteemed tragedies of Lucius Accius (170-c. 86). The six extant comedies of Terence (Publius Terentius Afer; c. 190-159) provide a sense of the variation in the comic tradition of the 2nd century. These authors also were outsiders, coming from the Celtic Po valley, Brundisium, Umbria, and North Africa, respectively. Thus, while assorted foreigners, some of servile origin, established a Latin literature by adapting Greek genres, metrical forms, and content, native Roman senators began to write history in Greek.

Other forms of Greek learning were slower to take root in Rome. Later Romans remembered that a Greek doctor established a practice in Rome for the first time just before the Second Punic War, but his reputation did little to stimulate Roman interest in the subject. Like doctors, Greek philosophers of the 2nd century were regarded with interest and suspicion. In the early 3rd century Romans had erected in public a statue of Pythagoras, a 6th-century Greek philosopher who had founded communities of philosophers in southern Italy. In the mid-2nd century some senators displayed an interest in philosophy. Scipio Aemilianus, Gaius Laelius (consul 140), and Lucius Furius Philus (consul 136) were among those who listened to the lectures of the three leaders of the Athenian philosophical schools visiting Rome on a diplomatic mission in 155--the academic Carneades, the peripatetic Critolaus, and the stoic Diogenes. On an official visit to the East in 140, Scipio included in his entourage the leading stoic Panaetius. In the same period, another stoic, Blossius of Cumae, was said to have influenced the reforming tribune Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus. Yet the philosophical influence should not be exaggerated; none of these senators was a philosopher or even a formal student of philosophy.

From Britannica CD 97

The great struggle now going on between Rome and Carthage attracted the attention of the whole civilized world. If was evident that Greece, distracted by intestine quarrels, must be soon swallowed up by whichever of those great states might prove successful; and of the two, the ambition of the Romans, who had already gained a footing on the eastern shores of the Adriatic was by far the more formidable to Greece. After the conclusion of the peace with the AEtolians Philip prepared a large fleet, which he employed to watch the movements of the Romans, and in the following year (216) he concluded a treaty with Hannibal, which, among other clauses, provided that the Romans should not be allowed to retain their conquests on the eastern side of the Adriatic. He even meditated an invasion of Italy, and with that view endeavoured to make himself master of Apollonia and Oricum. But though he succeeded in taking the latter city, the Romans surprised his camp whilst he was besieging Apollonia, and compelled him to burn his ships and retire. Meanwhile Philip had acted in a most arbitrary manner in the affairs of Greece; and when Aratus remonstrated with him respecting his proceedings, he got rid of his former friend and counsellor by means of a slow and secret poison (B.C. 213).

In B.C., 209 the Achaeans, being hard pressed by the AEtolians, were again induced to call in the aid of Philip. The spirit of the Achaeans was at this time revived by Philopoemen, one of the few noble characters of the period, and who has been styled by Plutarch "the last of the Greeks." He was a native of Megalopolis in Arcadia, and in 208 was elected Strategus of the league. In both these posts Philopoemen made great alterations and improvements in the arms and discipline of the Achaean forces, which he assimilated to those of the Macedonian phalanx. These reforms, as well as the public spirit with which he had inspired the Achaeans were attended with the most beneficial results. In 207 Philopoemen gained at Mantinea a signal victory over the Lacedaemonians, who had joined the Roman alliance; 4000 of them were left upon the field, and among them Machanidas who had made himself tyrant of Sparta. This decisive battle, combined with the withdrawal of the Romans, who, being desirous of turning their undivided attention towards Carthage, had made peace with Philip (205), secured for a few years the tranquillity of Greece. It also raised the fame of Philopoemen to its highest point; and in the next Nemean festival, being a second time general of the league, he was hailed by the assembled Greeks as the liberator of their country.

Upon the conclusion of the second Punic war the Romans renewed their enterprises in Greece, and declared war against Philip (B.C. 200). For some time the war lingered on without any decided success on either side; but in 198 the consul T. Quinctius Flamininus succeeded in gaining over the Achaean league to the Roman alliance; and as the AEtolians had previously deserted Philip, both those powers fought for a short time on the same side. In 197 the struggle was brought to a termination by the battle of Cynoscephalae, near Scotussa, in Thessaly, which decided the fate of the Macedonian monarchy. Philip was obliged to sue for peace, and in the following year (196) a treaty was ratified by which the Macedonians were compelled to renounce their supremacy, to withdraw their garrisons from the Grecian towns, to surrender their fleet, and to pay 1000 talents for the expenses of the war. At the ensuing Isthmian games Flamininus solemnly proclaimed the freedom of the Greeks, and was received by them with overwhelming joy and gratitude.

The AEtolians, dissatisfied with these arrangements, persuaded Antiochus III., king of Syria, to enter into a league against the Romans. He passed over into Greece with a wholly inadequate force, and was defeated by the Romans at Thermopylae (B.C. 191). The AEtolians were now compelled to make head against the Romans by themselves. After some ineffectual attempts at resistance they were reduced to sue for peace, which they at length obtained, but on the most humiliating conditions (B.C. 189). They were required to acknowledge the supremacy of Rome, to renounce all the conquests they had recently made, to pay an indemnity of 500 talents and to engage in future to aid the Romans in their wars. The power of the AEtolian league was thus for ever crushed, though it seems to have existed, in name at least, till a much later period.

The Achaean league still subsisted but was destined before long to experience the same fate as its rival. At first, indeed, it enjoyed the protection of the Romans, and even acquired an extension of members through their influence, but this protectorate involved a state of almost absolute dependence. Philopoemen also had succeeded, in the year 192, in adding Sparta to the league, which now embraced the whole of Peloponnesus. But Sparta having displayed symptoms of insubordination, Philopoemen marched against it in 188, and captured the city; when he put to death eighty of the leading men, razed the walls and fortifications, abolished the institutions of Lycurgus, and compelled the citizens to adopt the democratic constitution of the Achaeans. Meanwhile the Romans regarded with satisfaction the internal dissensions of Greece, which they foresaw would only render her an easier prey, and neglected to answer the appeals of the Spartans for protection. In 183 the Messenians, under the leadership of Dinocrates, having revolted from the league, Philopoemen, who had now attained the age of 70, led an expedition against them; but having fallen from his horse in a skirmish of cavalry, he was captured, and conveyed with many circumstances of ignominy to Messene, where, after a sort of mock trial, he was executed. His fate was avenged by Lycortas, the commander of the Achaean cavalry, the father of the historian Polybius.

William Smith, A Smaller History of Ancient Greece

From the Death of Alexander the Great to the Conquest of Greece by the Romans, B.C. 323-146

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