Greece and
Rome: An Integrated History of the Ancient
Mediterranean

by Robert Garland
(Biography)

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The following materials are provided
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links below for free information including a
professor-authored course summary, recommended web
links, and a condensed bibliography.

Course
Summary - Professor's written description of the
course.

Professor
Recommended Links

Condensed
Bibliography - Prepared by the professor for
this course.

Course
Summary

Most courses on Greek or Roman history are just
that—courses on either Greek or Roman history.
This one will venture into relatively unexplored
territory by investigating the numerous ways in
which two very different cultures intersected,
coincided, and at times collided. The relationship
between the Greeks and the Romans has virtually no
parallel in world history in that their contact
created a unique fusion of cultural expression
identified as “Greco-Roman.” The backdrop to this
course is the Mediterranean, which not only served
to facilitate trade and other encounters but also
gave a degree of uniformity to the lives of the
peoples living around its circumference.

Traditionally, ancient historians have tended
to characterize Greco-Roman culture in terms of
Rome’s “debt” to Greece. This course will
demonstrate that while the Romans did indeed owe a
great deal to Greek creativity and inventiveness,
they transformed everything that they borrowed
into a distinctly Roman form. Moreover, though
many Greeks disdained Romans as the uncultivated
product of an upstart and inferior civilization,
they benefited greatly from the relationship,
notably because of the stable political conditions
that prevailed under Roman rule in the eastern
Mediterranean from the middle of the 2nd century
B.C. onwards. These conditions provided the
seedbed in which Hellenism could continue to
flourish and evolve until late antiquity and
beyond.

Our course has three specific foci: The first
is political and military. It begins in the middle
of the 8th century B.C., when Rome was founded and
when the Greeks were beginning to establish
colonies in Italy. It continues down to A.D. 500,
well into the Byzantine era, named after
Constantinople, formerly Byzantium, which became
the new capital of the Roman Empire. The lectures
will trace the course of events that determined
the relationship between the two peoples
throughout this period of 1,500 years. It will
give emphasis to the cultural contacts that took
place in Campania (southern Italy) and Sicily
before Rome subjugated the whole of Italy; to the
military successes Rome achieved against Pyrrhus
of Epirus, who established control of southern
Italy and posed a threat to Rome’s increasing
dominance; to the wars that the Romans fought
against the Hellenistic monarchs who assumed
control of the fragmented empire of Alexander the
Great; and to the wars they fought against
Mithradates VI of Pontus, who led a rebellion
against Roman rule in Asia and mainland
Greece.

The second focus of the course is on those
aspects of life in the ancient Mediterranean
which, broadly speaking, all ancient peoples
faced, and to which they responded somewhat
similarly. These include attitudes toward death,
sexuality, and leisure. We will also examine
attitudes toward women, foreigners, and slaves,
whom all Mediterranean cultures treated as
inferior to the male citizen body. The interaction
between the two peoples is colored and even
dominated by the fact that the Romans, having
subjugated the Greeks, then set the latter to work
as slaves. This was particularly true in areas
that we consider to be the reserve of
professionals, such as in medicine and
education.

The third focus of the course is the variety of
ways in which the Greeks and Romans interacted
with one another on a cultural level. The forms of
cultural expression that we will investigate
include religion, art, architecture, medicine,
science, technology, various literary genres,
education, and philosophy. Although Greek cultural
achievements provided the original point of
departure in all these areas, the Romans were
never merely derivative.

The course will then return to the period when
the Jews, Christians, Greeks, and Romans came
increasingly into contact and conflict with each
other. We will see how Greece (notably Athens),
thanks to imperial patronage, recovered much of
its former cultural glory; how a shift in the
balance of power between the western and eastern
halves of the empire occurred after the foundation
of Constantinople by Emperor Constantine I in A.D.
330; and finally how a “parting of the ways” took
place when the two halves finally split after the
death of Theodosius I in A.D. 395. Even then,
however, their destinies remained entwined, as the
Byzantine Emperor Justinian sought to recover
control of Italy before the Lombards effectively
erased his achievement.

Throughout our course we will call upon a wide
variety of sources—literature, archaeology, the
visual arts, coinage, inscriptions—in order to
assemble the fascinating but complex picture of
two peoples in constant and indissoluble
contact.
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Professor Recommended
Links

http://wings.buffalo.edu/AandL/Maecenas

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/

http://www.tlg.uci.edu/index/resources.html

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Condensed
Bibliography

These selected titles
from the reading list are now available on
Amazon.com. Click on a title for more information
and/or to order the title.

Beard, Mary, and John
Henderson. Classical Art: From Greece to
Rome

Entertaining and
provocative account of Greek and Roman art, with
fascinating insights into its modern reception.

Rutherford, Richard. Classical Literature: A
Concise History

Comprehensive
introduction to classical literature, arranged
genre by genre.

Alcock, Susan. Graecia Capta: The Landscapes
of Roman Greece

Excellent study
of the plight of Greece under Roman
rule.

Virgil. The
Aeneid

Arguably the key work for
understanding how Greek impacted upon Roman
literature.

Walbank, F.W. The Hellenistic
World

Covers both the cultural
as well as the political developments of the
Hellenistic era.

Gruen, Erich. The Hellenistic World and the
Coming of Rome

Masterly account
of Rome’s political impact on the Greek world,
combined with interesting assessment of Greece’s
response to Roman rule.

Hornblower, Simon and
Antony Spawforth. The Oxford Classical
Dictionary

Justifiably billed as
“the ultimate reference work on the Classical
World.”

Polybius. The Rise of the Roman
Empire

The only surviving
historical account of the first half of the
second century BC, critical in Rome’s relations
with the Greek world.

In some cases the only
available book from Amazon is a newer edition than
the one used by the professor. The edition used by
the professor may be available on the used market.

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