Classical antiquity

• 1. Introduction

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  Classical antiquity is the name historians give to roughly thirteen centuries of human civilization, stretching from the 8th century BC to the 5th century AD. In Edgar Allan Poe's words, it was "the glory that was Greece, and the grandeur that was Rome." Those two phrases have echoed through the centuries because they capture something real: a period so formative that its fingerprints still appear on the legal codes, political systems, languages, and architecture of the modern world.

  Conventionally, the era opens with the earliest recorded epic poetry of Homer, whose lifetime scholars place in the 8th or 7th century BC. It closes, just as conventionally, with the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD. Between those two bookends lies a vast and tangled web of civilizations: Phoenicians and Carthaginians, Etruscans and Sabines, warring Greek city-states and a Roman republic that slowly consumed them all.

  How did a poet and a set of Olympic Games become the starting pistol for a civilization? How did a city supposedly founded by twins on the banks of the Tiber end up controlling Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the fringes of Britain? And why, a thousand years after Rome's western half collapsed, were the Founding Fathers of the United States still borrowing its vocabulary?

• 2. Before the City-States

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  In 776 BC, by traditional reckoning, the Ancient Olympic Games were first held. That date falls within the same period when the earliest Greek alphabetic inscriptions began to appear, and when Homer is assumed to have composed his epics. The written word and organized competition arrived in the Greek world at roughly the same moment.

  The Phoenicians, expanding outward from ports in Canaan, had already come to dominate Mediterranean trade by the 8th century BC. Their offshoot, Carthage, was founded in 814 BC, and by 700 BC Carthaginian strongholds had taken root in Sicily, Italy, and Sardinia. Those footholds brought the Carthaginians into direct conflict with the Etruscans, who by the late 7th century BC had established political control over much of Iron Age Italy and formed an aristocratic, monarchical elite.

  Far to the east, a stele found in Kition, Cyprus records the victory of King Sargon II in 709 BC over seven kings of the island, marking the transfer of Cyprus from Tyrian to Neo-Assyrian control. These overlapping expansions, by Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, and Etruscans, set the contested stage onto which Greece and then Rome would step.

  In Greece, the Archaic period followed the Dark Ages and brought a burst of political invention: the beginnings of democracy, advances in philosophy, the rise of theatre and poetry, and the recovery of a written language that had been lost entirely in the preceding centuries. In pottery alone, the shift was visible: from the geometric styles of the Dark Ages, Greek craftsmen moved through the Orientalizing style, absorbing influences from Egypt, Phoenicia, and Syria, before producing the black-figure pottery that originated in Corinth in the 7th century BC and the red-figure style developed by the Andokides Painter around 530 BC.

• 3. Rome's Founding Myths

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  According to legend, Rome was founded on the 21st of April 753 BC by twin descendants of the Trojan prince Aeneas: Romulus and Remus. The city lacked women, so the story goes, and the Latins invited the neighboring Sabines to a festival and abducted their unmarried daughters, an act that ultimately led to the integration of the two peoples.

  Archaeological evidence does confirm early settlement: traces appear at the Roman Forum from the mid-8th century BC, and settlements on the Palatine Hill may reach back to the 10th century BC. The tension between legend and evidence was something Romans themselves lived with comfortably.

  Seven kings ruled Rome by tradition, and the seventh, Tarquinius Superbus, was of Etruscan birth, the son of Tarquinius Priscus and son-in-law of Servius Tullius. During his reign, the Etruscans reached the peak of their power. Superbus removed and destroyed Sabine shrines and altars from the Tarpeian Rock, turning public opinion against him. The final rupture came when his own son raped the patrician woman Lucretia, and Superbus refused to acknowledge the crime. Lucretia's kinsman, Lucius Junius Brutus, an ancestor of the later Marcus Brutus, summoned the Senate and drove Superbus from the city in 510 BC. The Senate voted the following year, in 509 BC, never to permit a king again, and the Republic was born.

  The Etruscan model left its mark even as it was expelled. The republican government that replaced the monarchy was itself a reaction shaped by Etruscan excess, and the Latin tribes who had reinvented their political arrangements in the late 6th century BC built those arrangements explicitly around restraining the power of any single ruler.

• 4. Greece at Its Height

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  The classical period of ancient Greece runs roughly from 510 BC, when Spartan troops helped Athenians overthrow the tyrant Hippias, to 323 BC, the year Alexander the Great died. In that span of less than two centuries, Greece fought off Persia, built an empire of influence, and then tore itself apart.

  The Greco-Persian Wars lasted from 499 to 449 BC. Their conclusion, sealed by the Peace of Callias, freed Greece, Macedon, Thrace, and Ionia from Persian rule. Athens emerged from those wars as the dominant power in the Delian League, a dominance that alarmed Sparta and eventually triggered the Peloponnesian War, which ran from 431 to 404 BC and ended in Spartan victory.

  Spartain hegemony did not last. By 395 BC, Sparta's rulers dismissed the commander Lysander from office and lost their naval supremacy. Athens, Argos, Thebes, and Corinth, the latter two former Spartan allies, challenged Spartan power in the Corinthian War, which ended inconclusively in 387 BC. Then in 371 BC, the Theban generals Epaminondas and Pelopidas won the Battle of Leuctra, finishing Spartan supremacy and installing Theban hegemony in its place. Thebes held dominance until 346 BC, when the rising power of Macedon eclipsed it.

  Philip II of Macedon, who reigned from 359 to 336 BC, pushed into the territories of the Paeonians, the Thracians, and the Illyrians. His son Alexander, born in 356 BC and dead by 323 BC, briefly stretched Macedonian power across the Persian Empire, into Egypt, and as far east as the edges of India. At Alexander's death the empire fractured among his successors, the Diadochi, and the Hellenistic period began. Greek became the common language of a vast territory far beyond Greece, and Hellenistic culture blended with the traditions of Persia, Central Asia, Egypt, and the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.

• 5. The Republic That Became an Empire

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  Rome's Republican period began around 509 BC and lasted more than 450 years, a half-millennium in which the city grew from a regional power of the Latium plain into the dominant force in Italy and then the Mediterranean world. The unification of Italy came through a series of grinding wars in the 4th and 3rd centuries BC: the Samnite Wars, the Latin War, and the Pyrrhic War. Victories in the Punic Wars and the Macedonian Wars made Rome a super-regional power by the 2nd century BC.

  That expansion brought instability at home. Economic disruption and social unrest fed events such as the Catiline conspiracy, the Social War, and the First Triumvirate. The Republic did not end with a clean break; Roman citizens living through the transition did not recognize that the Republic had ceased to exist. The early emperors of the Julio-Claudian line insisted the res publica still stood, merely under their protection, and the Roman state kept calling itself a res publica as long as it used Latin as its official language.

  By the reign of Trajan, which peaked at AD 117, Rome controlled the entire Mediterranean, Gaul, parts of Germania and Britannia, the Balkans, Dacia, Asia Minor, the Caucasus, and Mesopotamia. Culturally, the empire was deeply Hellenized, but it also absorbed syncretic eastern traditions including Mithraism, Gnosticism, and eventually Christianity.

  Roman family structure differed sharply from the Greek model. The Latin word familia referred not just to blood relatives but to everyone under the authority of a male head of household, including enslaved people and servants. Divorce, permitted from the 1st century BC onward, could be initiated by either husband or wife, a legal right that distinguished Rome from many contemporary societies.

• 6. The Long Unraveling

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  The crisis of the third century began the weakening of the Roman Empire, and by the 4th century Christianity was spreading rapidly enough to displace the imperial cult entirely. The Theodosian decrees of 393 made that displacement official. Germanic invasions then ate away at the Western Empire through the 5th century, while the Eastern Roman Empire, which its own citizens called Romania, persisted into the medieval period and was later labeled the Byzantine Empire by historians.

  Historians have proposed several candidate dates for the symbolic end of antiquity. The deposition of the last Western Roman Emperor in 476 is the most common choice. Others point to 529, when the Eastern Roman emperor Justinian I closed the last Platonic Academy in Athens. A third set of candidates spans 634 to 718, when Muslim forces conquered Syria in 637, Egypt in 639, Cyprus in 654, North Africa in 665, Hispania in 718, parts of Southern Gaul by 720, and later Crete, Sicily, and Malta. Those conquests severed the economic, cultural, and political connections that had bound the classical Mediterranean world together.

  A single thread of institutional memory ran surprisingly long. The original Roman Senate continued to issue decrees into the late 6th century. Emperor Maurice, who reigned until 602, was the last Eastern Roman emperor to conduct his court in Constantinople in Latin. His overthrow by a mutinying army commanded by Phocas triggered the Slavic invasion of the Balkans and sparked the Byzantine-Sasanian War of 602-628, in which all the great eastern cities except Constantinople fell.

  Constantinople itself remained unconquered and continued as the largest city in Europe, preserving classical books, sculptures, technologies, cuisine, and scholarly traditions well into the Middle Ages. The city's inhabitants called themselves Romans. When the Ottomans finally captured Constantinople in 1453, they adopted the same term: Rûm and Romaioi both derive from the Roman identity the city had maintained for a thousand years. Refugees fleeing that conquest brought classical scholarship westward, contributing directly to the Renaissance.

• 7. Political Echoes

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  Charlemagne's coronation as "Roman Emperor" in the year 800 was the moment when Rome's political ghost achieved its most visible form. The act created the Holy Roman Empire, which ruled central Europe until 1806. From this period came the concept that an emperor outranks a king, a hierarchy that organized European politics for centuries.

  In Constantinople the Byzantine Emperor was regarded as sovereign of the entire Christian world, with even the Patriarch of Constantinople subordinate to him as "God's Vicegerent on Earth." After the Ottoman conquest in 1453, the Russian Czars, whose title derives directly from Caesar, claimed the Byzantine legacy. Moscow became known as the "Third Rome," and that divine-right imperial tradition persisted into the 20th century.

  In the West, Latin culture survived through the Catholic Church long after Roman secular authority vanished. The popes still carry the title Pontifex Maximus, which during the classical period belonged to the emperor. The ideal of a unified Christian civilization extended Rome's cultural reach even where its legions no longer marched.

  The Founding Fathers of the United States drew consciously on Roman republicanism. They named their government a republic, from the Latin res publica, gave it a Senate and a President, another Latin term, and chose those words deliberately over available English equivalents like commonwealth and parliament. In Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, Roman martial imagery shaped the state's self-presentation, visible in the architecture of the Panthéon and the Arc de Triomphe and in the paintings of Jacques-Louis David. The painter Isadora Duncan's desire to move as the ancient Greeks had moved led her to develop a new form of ballet, just one instance of how Greece and Rome kept reshaping the arts long after both civilizations had ended.

• 8. The Long Cultural Afterlife

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  Epic poetry in Latin continued to be written and read well into the 19th century. Both John Milton and Arthur Rimbaud received their first poetic educations in Latin, a fact that shaped the literary traditions of English and French letters respectively.

  In philosophy, Thomas Aquinas built his theological framework largely on Aristotle, crossing the enormous gap between Hellenic polytheism and medieval Christianity by treating Greek logic as a neutral tool. In medicine, the Greek and Roman authorities Hippocrates and Galen remained the foundations of practice even longer than Greek thought remained dominant in philosophy.

  French playwrights Molière and Racine wrote on mythological and classical historical subjects, subjecting their dramas to the strict rules of the classical unities derived from Aristotle's Poetics. Washington, DC filled its public spaces with large marble buildings whose facades imitate Greek temples, their columns built in the classical orders of architecture, though scholars note these designs were more directly inspired by Roman precedents than Greek ones.

  Surviving fragments of classical culture helped produce the revival that began in the 14th century and became the Renaissance. Further neo-classical revivals followed in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Greco-Roman cultural inheritance continued to act as a recurring resource for later societies, shaping language, law, politics, educational systems, philosophy, science, rhetoric, and warfare. The question each revival answered differently was which aspects of that inheritance to claim, and which to set aside, a negotiation the Renaissance itself began by insisting, in the words Poe later echoed, that what had been lost was pure glory.