The Roman Empire (Beginner's Guides) by Matyszak Philip

Author:Matyszak, Philip [Matyszak, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781780744254
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2014-04-02T16:00:00+00:00

The Greek east

For years now the Orontes [a river in Lebanon and Syria] has been disgorging into the Tiber.

A character of Juvenal’s complains about immigrants

in Satires 3.62

Where Rome brought a new, urban and cosmopolitan perspective to the north and north-west of Europe, its cultural impact on the peoples of the east was less dramatic. There, urban culture had been established for millennia and patterns of international trade were long established. Also, while the Latin language unified the diverse peoples of the west, the east already had common tongues in Greek and Syriac; Latin was mainly a language of officialdom. The main effect of the Roman Empire in the east was felt through the Pax Romana, which brought economic growth and prosperity to the western seaboard of Anatolia and cities such as Alexandria in Egypt.

Greece had perhaps contributed most to Mediterranean culture in the millennium before 100 CE. Its culture had spread as far as modern Afghanistan and fused with Roman culture on Europe’s most westerly shores, but in the second century CE the land where it started was a peaceful imperial backwater. The Romans were sentimental about Greece; emperors as diverse as Nero and Hadrian were passionate philhellenes. Consequently, much of Achaea (as the province was called) consisted of ‘free’ cities that paid little or no tax to Rome, although many Achaean cities were too poor to have contributed much even if they had been taxed. The emperor Hadrian attempted to unite Greek cities into a loose social and religious union, the ‘Panhellenion’, but once his successors lost interest it, like most previous Greek political unions, collapsed in infighting.

If the situation warranted it, the emperors had little compunction about interfering in the affairs of cities, ‘free’ or not. Generally, such interference took the form of a special official, who held the self-explanatory title of ‘corrector’. Even Athens merited the visit of a corrector sent by Trajan to sort out a deep financial crisis. Athens held an honoured place in Roman culture and many Romans went to Attica to study. One such was the writer and grammarian Aulus Gellius (approximately 125–182 CE), who published his notes and musings from his time as a student in Athens as the Attic Nights. We also know much about the contemporary city from the sophist and senator Herodes Atticus, who rose to high rank in the imperial system under Hadrian. Herodes added to Athens a small theatre for poetry readings and drama and a stadium for sporting events. The emperors Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius boosted the city’s academic reputation by establishing a school of rhetoric. Today, the flourishing of Greek writers in this period is often referred to as the ‘second sophistic’ movement. While Athens polished its reputation for learning and the arts, its former great rival, Sparta, became so Spartan as to become virtually a parody of itself. The agoge, a sadistic method of raising young men to be impervious to pain and discomfort, had once created the city’s invincible warrior, the hoplites.

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