Course Lecture Titles

1.

Who Were the Greeks? Who Were the Romans?

2.

Trade and Travel in the Mediterranean

3.

Democratic or Republican

4.

Law and Order

5.

Less than Fully Human

6.

Close Encounters, 750–272 B.C.

7.

The Velvet Glove, 272–190 B.C.

8.

How the Two Polytheisms (Almost) Merged

9.

The Iron Fist, 190–146 B.C.

10.

The Last Hellenistic Dynasts, 146–31 B.C.

11.

Why the Greeks Lost, Why the Romans Won

12.

Philhellenism and Hellenophobia

13.

The Two Languages

14.

Leisure and Entertainment

15.

Sex and Sexuality

16.

Death and the Afterlife

17.

From Mystery Religion to Ruler Cult

18.

Greek Cities under Roman Rule

19.

Greeks in Rome, Romans in Greece

20.

The Hellenism of Augustus

21.

Art, Looting, and Reproductions

22.

Architecture, Sacred and Secular

23.

Science and Technology

24.

Disease, Medical Care, and Physicians

25.

The Greek Epic and Its Roman Echo

26.

Tragedy and Comedy

27.

Love Poetry, Satire, History, the Novel

28.

Greek Influences on Roman Education

29.

Greek Philosophy and Its Roman Advocates

30.

Hellenomania from Nero to Hadrian

31.

Jews, Greeks, and Romans

32.

Christianity's Debt to Greece and Rome

33.

The Apotheosis of Athens

34.

The Decline of the West

35.

The Survival of the East

36.

The Enduring Duo

Greece and
Rome: An Integrated History of the Ancient Mediterranean

(36 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture)
Course No.
3300

Taught by Robert
Garland
Colgate University
M.A., McMaster University
Ph.D., University College London

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"Greece,
the captive, made their savage victor captive." So wrote the
Roman poet Horace in the 1st century B.C., when Rome's
matchless armies had consolidated control over the entire
Mediterranean world. Greece lay vanquished along with scores
of other formerly independent lands. Yet Horace saw that
something was special about Greece.

What did Horace mean?

What did Greek culture symbolize to the Romans, who were
far more successful militarily?

How did Greeks, in turn, view their Latin-speaking
rulers?

And how did these two independent branches of ancient
civilization develop and then become inextricably entwined,
with implications for all subsequent Western culture?

A Marriage of Civilizations

Greece and Rome: An Integrated History of the
Ancient Mediterranean explores the many ways in which
two very different cultures intersected, coincided, and at
times collided. The relationship between Greeks and Romans has
virtually no parallel in world history. Their contact created
the extraordinary fusion that we call Greco-Roman—a unique
marriage of civilizations that encompasses statecraft,
mythology, language, philosophy, literature, fine arts,
architecture, science, and much else.

Yet there is truth to the traditional view that parts of
our cultural heritage derive specifically from Greece or from
Rome. For example, the West owes its law codes to the legally
oriented outlook of the Romans. By contrast, drama, which
never caught on in Roman circles, is a wholly Greek invention.
This is an example of how the relationship between these two
cultures was like a marriage: two distinct personalities,
competing in some areas, sharing in others, and creating a
completely new synthesis in a third realm.

This cultural partnership began almost with the first
recorded contact of Greeks and Romans in the 4th century B.C.
and continued for almost 1,000 years. Consider these revealing
clues:

Much of what we think of today as Classical Greek art
is, in fact, copies commissioned by wealthy Roman
connoisseurs. The common museum label "Roman copy of a lost
Greek original" attests to this fusion of Roman taste and
Greek artistry.

Romans displayed a love–hate relationship with Greece,
epitomized by the Roman politician Cato the Elder, who was
deeply immersed in Greek culture but who publicly denounced
its corrupting influence.

Educated Romans were predominately bilingual in Greek.
Caesar's dying words were not the Latin "Et tu, Brute?" as
Shakespeare has it in Julius Caesar, but reportedly the
Greek "Kai su, teknon?" meaning "You too, child?"

Christianity flourished and spread in the unsurpassed
infrastructure of the Roman Empire. But the language of the
New Testament is Greek, as is the philosophical outlook of
Christianity's earliest theologians.

"There's never been anything quite like it," Professor
Robert Garland marvels. "Greece and Rome are two cultures
joined at the hip, arguably the most special and the most
important relationship in all of history."

What You Will Learn

Greece and Rome brings together numerous
historical and cultural themes for a close analysis of the two
cultures that dominated the ancient Mediterranean world. If
you are entirely new to this subject, you will find Professor
Garland's presentation an ideal introduction to Classical
civilization. And if you are already steeped in different
details of the story, this course is a unique perspective on a
central overriding influence of the era.

Greece and Rome begins by asking:

Who were the Greeks and Romans?

What were their images of themselves?

How did they organize their societies?

Then you proceed to explore their interactions through
trade and, inevitably, war as Roman influence began to spread
into the eastern Mediterranean.

The world of the Greeks that the Romans encountered during
this period, from the 3rd to 1st centuries B.C., was the
spectacular Hellenistic civilization created by the conquests
of Alexander the Great. It was a unified Greek culture with
stunning artistic and intellectual achievements that
thoroughly captivated—or "Hellenized"—the Romans. But their
political interactions with the Greeks were another
matter.

You will follow the long series of wars in which the Romans
at first preserved Greek independence while suppressing
hostile Greek rulers. Then Rome grew impatient with Greek
ingratitude, duplicity, and infighting, and eventually
resorted to the efficient brutality for which Rome's legions
were renowned. With the death of Cleopatra, the last of the
Ptolemaic Greek rulers, in 31 B.C., Rome had conquered not
only every Greek land, but the entire Mediterranean world. For
the next half millennium, Greece and Rome would be
inseparable.

Greece and Rome goes well beyond the
political and military stories to immerse you in the details
of life in Classical antiquity, investigating Greek and Roman
approaches to human universals such as death, leisure, and
sex. You will also explore, in depth, the emergence and
development of an integrated Greco-Roman culture as reflected
in religion, art, architecture, medicine, science, technology,
various literary genres, education, and philosophy.

Finally, you will look at the challenges posed by Judaism
and Christianity, and discover how the empire split into a
Greek-speaking East and a Roman-speaking West.

How Were Greeks and Romans Different?

For all their similarities, Greeks and Romans were
different enough that each engaged in cultural stereotyping of
the other that amounted to latent racism. However, their more
substantive differences included these:

Religion: Greek religion was
anthropomorphic, with deities displaying human form and
manner. Early Romans didn't believe in deities, but rather
in numina—divine powers that had precise functions
but no physical identity.

View of foreigners: Romans were far
more diverse in origin than the Greeks, which made the
Romans more open to foreigners. This had profound effects,
as the Romans used grants of citizenship as a political tool
to cement allies and expand empire.

Entertainment: Most Greeks didn't enjoy
seeing people butcher one another. The Romans, by contrast,
had an inexhaustible appetite for gladiatorial combat, wild
animal shows with human captives as prey, and public
executions.

Building big: The largest structures in
the Greek world were theaters, some of which could hold
20,000–40,000 people. The Romans had a more grandiose
concept of public space. The Circus Maximus, where chariot
races took place, could pack in 250,000 spectators.

Thinking deep: The Greeks delighted in
analyzing the world, asking questions such as: What is the
nature of existence? What constitutes the ideal state? What
is virtue? For their part, the Romans were content to run
the world.

Plutarch on Greeks, Romans, and
Learning

In the 1st century, a prolific Greek writer emerged who is
emblematic of everything this course is about. Plutarch
recognized the value of examining the Greeks and Romans
alongside one another, and wrote a celebrated set of parallel
biographies of famous Greeks and Romans. He also believed that
Greek and Roman histories hold instructive parallels.

Plutarch wrote on education as well, and in Lecture 28 you
will hear Professor Garland read this quote: "Learning, of all
human enterprises, alone is immortal and divine. The two chief
things in human nature are mind and reason. The mind exercises
control over reason … and it alone comes to maturity with
increase of years, and the lapse of time, which strips away
everything else, adds understanding to old age."

Should I Buy Audio or Video?

This course works well in either format. The DVD version
contains more than 200 maps and hundreds of images of
artifacts, ruins, works of art, and reconstructions of ancient
life.

Note: Lecture 15: Sex and Sexuality deals frankly with
sexuality and contains graphic material that may not be
suitable for all audiences. Parental discretion is
advised.

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