Roman Greece

Roman Greece begins in 146 BC, when Rome destroyed Corinth and dissolved the Achaean League, and runs to the division of the empire in 395. Greece had been fought over by Rome for fifty years before that, and had repeatedly chosen the losing side. The province of Achaea that followed was poor, depopulated and politically inert. Its cities kept their local institutions and lost everything else. What Greece retained was cultural authority, and Rome deferred to it more thoroughly than to any other conquest. Educated Romans learned Greek, sent their sons to Athens, and collected Greek art in quantities that stripped the sanctuaries. Horace's line about captive Greece taking her savage captor prisoner is the standard summary and is roughly accurate. Emperors intervened personally: Nero toured, competed in the games and declared the province free; Hadrian rebuilt Athens, completed the temple of Olympian Zeus after six centuries, and founded a pan-Hellenic league. The Second Sophistic made Greek rhetoric fashionable across the empire. Christianity arrived early, Paul preaching at Athens and Corinth in the 50s. Decline came with the third-century invasions, when the Herulians sacked Athens in 267. The Visigoths came through in 396. When the empire divided in 395 Greece fell to the eastern half, which spoke its language, and it remained the core of that state for another thousand years. Corinth was refounded as a Roman colony a century after its destruction. Sparta survived as a tourist attraction, staging archaic rituals for Roman visitors. The Olympic games continued until they were abolished by Theodosius in 393. Pausanias wrote a guidebook to the province in the second century that is still used to identify sites.

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