Greece in the Roman era

• 1. Introduction

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  Greece in the Roman era begins with a single battle in 146 BC, when the city of Corinth fell to Rome and a civilization that had shaped the ancient world found itself subject to the very people it had educated. The Roman general who marched into Corinth that year did not conquer a defeated culture; he inherited one. The Romans had their own word for what they encountered: Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit. Captive Greece captured her rude conqueror. That paradox sits at the heart of nearly six centuries of shared history. What does it mean for a conquering empire to be so thoroughly shaped by the people it subdued? How did Greek cities navigate Roman rule, sometimes flourishing as never before, sometimes sacked and looted? And what happened when Rome itself finally fractured, leaving Greece at the center of the half that endured?

• 2. The Road to Conquest

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  Rome's first encounter with Greek political culture did not happen in Greece itself. It happened in Magna Graecia, the belt of Greek colonies across southern Italy and Sicily. After Rome's victory in the Pyrrhic War in 275 BC, most of those southern Italian cities passed into Rome's indirect control, giving Roman commanders their first extended experience of Greek civic institutions.

  The path to mainland Greece ran through Macedonia. Rome fought the Macedonian kingdom in a series of wars stretched across decades, each one tightening the grip. In the Second Macedonian War, the Achaean League switched sides and allied with Rome against Macedonia in 197 BC. The decisive blow came in the Third Macedonian War, when the Roman general Aemilius Paullus defeated the Macedonian king Perseus at Pydna in 168 BC. Rome initially divided the conquered territory into four smaller republics rather than absorbing it outright.

  That arrangement collapsed when a royal pretender named Andriscus seized power and launched what became the Fourth Macedonian War. The war ended at another battle of Pydna in 148 BC, and this time Rome made Macedonia a permanent province with a standing garrison. Two years later, the Achaean League was crushed at Corinth, and the Greek peninsula passed formally into Roman hands.

• 3. Life Under the Republic

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  Roman rule of Greece under the Republic was less uniform than the word "occupation" suggests. Some key poleis, including Athens and Sparta, retained the status of free cities: partly autonomous, exempt from direct Roman taxation, and permitted local self-government. Rome did, however, systematically transfer political power away from more democratic factions and toward propertied classes with economic ties to Rome. The leagues that had linked Greek cities were dissolved, and direct trade between cities was restricted.

  The historian Polybius, himself a Greek, was charged by the Roman Senate with mediating property disputes that arose after the invasion, a role that illustrates how Roman administration depended on Greek intermediaries even at the institutional level. Land confiscation was limited; a land tax was levied instead. Greece proved so quiet a province that Rome eventually allowed the cities to form leagues again. The Via Egnatia, built in the second century BC, connected the Adriatic to the Aegean and served the rapid movement of troops across the region.

  Quiet did not mean content. In 88 BC, Athens and other Greek city-states rose against Rome in the First Mithridatic War, driven partly by the suppression of democratic government. General Lucius Cornelius Sulla suppressed the revolt, but the military campaign inflicted severe economic damage on central Greece. Later, during Rome's own civil wars, Greece chose sides repeatedly and paid for it. The country largely backed Pompey against Julius Caesar, witnessed the decisive Battle of Pharsalus on its own soil in 48 BC, then backed Caesar's assassins in the conflict that followed. After the Battle of Philippi in 42 BC, Mark Antony took the eastern territories, sometimes governing from Athens, and Greece bore the financial burden of supplying his forces until Augustus reorganized the region and created the province of Achaea in 27 BC.

• 4. Rome Builds, Greece Transforms

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  Under the Roman Empire, the physical landscape of Greece changed in ways that are still visible. Rome established Corinth as the capital of the province of Achaea. Athens was rebuilt and expanded with imperial investment. Julius Caesar began construction of a new Roman agora in Athens; Augustus completed it. The main entrance, the Gate of Athena Archegetis, was dedicated to Athens' patron goddess. Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa built the Agrippeia at the center of the Ancient Agora.

  No emperor left a more personal architectural mark on Athens than Hadrian. Before becoming emperor he had served as the eponymous archon of Athens, the city's highest civic magistrate. He considered himself a successor to Pericles and funded the Library of Hadrian. He also completed the Temple of Olympian Zeus, a project that had been started by Athenian tyrants but abandoned because the scale was considered an invitation to hubris. The temple had waited roughly 638 years for its completion. The Athenians responded by building the Arch of Hadrian in his honor.

  The emperor Nero arrived in 66 AD and performed at the Ancient Olympic Games, bending the rules that barred non-Greeks from competing. He was declared the winner of every contest he entered, and the following year he publicly proclaimed the freedom of the Greeks at the Isthmian Games in Corinth, echoing a gesture that the Roman general Flamininus had made more than two centuries earlier.

  The Pax Romana became the longest sustained period of peace in Greek history. Greece served as a major junction of maritime trade between Rome and the Greek-speaking eastern half of the empire. Greek intellectuals such as the physician Galen carried their work to Rome itself. The apostle Paul of Tarsus preached in Philippi, Corinth, and Athens, and Thessalonica became one of the most heavily Christianized cities in the empire.

• 5. Division and Survival

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  During the 2nd and 3rd centuries, the Greek territories were reorganized into several provinces: Achaea, Macedonia, Epirus, and Thrace. Under Diocletian in the late 3rd century, Moesia was structured as a diocese governed by Galerius. Constantine, who adopted Christianity, placed Greece within the prefectures of Macedonia and Thrace. When Theodosius later divided the prefecture of Macedonia, it produced the provinces of Creta, Achaea, Thessalia, Epirus Vetus, Epirus Nova, and Macedonia. The Aegean islands were grouped as the province of Insulae in the Diocese of Asia.

  The late Roman period brought invasions from the Heruli, Goths, and Vandals. The chief advisor to the emperor Arcadius, a man named Eutropius, allowed Alaric to enter Greece, and Alaric's forces looted Athens, Corinth, and the Peloponnese. Stilicho drove Alaric out around 397 AD, after which Alaric was appointed magister militum in Illyricum before eventually leading the Goths into Italy and sacking Rome in 410.

  Yet recent archaeological discoveries have revised the old picture of late antique Greece as a region in terminal decline. The polis, as a functioning institution, appears to have remained prosperous until at least the 6th century. A contemporary text, Hierocles' Syndekmos, records that late antique Greece contained approximately eighty cities and was highly urbanized. Scholars now broadly accept that between the 4th and 7th centuries, Greece ranked among the most economically active regions of the eastern Mediterranean. When the emperor Heraclius changed the empire's official language from Latin to Greek in the early 7th century, he was formalizing a reality that the eastern provinces had lived for centuries.

• 6. The Long Aftermath

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  After the fall of the western Roman Empire, Greece remained at the core of what continued: the Eastern Roman Empire, now known to historians as the Byzantine Empire. This was not a clean inheritance. Mainland Greece became a contested space, fought over by the Roman and Bulgarian Empires, raided by Slavic tribes and Normans. Crete and Cyprus passed between Roman and Arab hands before the Crusaders took them. Following the Sack of Constantinople in 1204, the Crusaders established a Latin Empire in Greece. Byzantine forces retook Constantinople and reasserted control over most of the peninsula, though Epirus would remain an independent splinter state until the early 14th century.

  Civil conflict within the Byzantine state opened further opportunities for outside powers. The Serbian Empire conquered most of mainland Greece during one such period of instability. A resurgent Bulgarian Empire pressed from the north. Over the century that followed, the Ottoman Empire absorbed all three powers and completed its conquest of Greece with the fall of the Morea in 1460.

  Greeks today generally view the Roman period of occupation as a difficult interlude separating the age of the city-states from the civilization of the Eastern Roman Empire. The Horatian line that Romans themselves quoted, about captive Greece capturing her rude conqueror, captures something real. The Greek language outlasted Latin as the empire's official tongue. Greek philosophy shaped Roman intellectual life from Scipio Africanus to Seneca to Ovid. And Constantinople, the city Constantine renamed in 330 AD from Byzantium and called Nova Roma, carried a Greco-Roman culture that endured for nearly a thousand years after Rome fell.