Greece under Rome: "captive Greece took her conqueror captive"

Around 200 BC, Greece was a land of cities and leagues, with the kings of Macedon as the strongest power nearby. Rome, a rising power from Italy, fought those kings and won: it beat Philip V in 197 BC and his son Perseus in 168 BC. In 146 BC a Roman army destroyed the rich city of Corinth. After that, Rome was the master of Greece.

Then something unusual happened. The winners admired the culture of the people they had beaten. Young Romans went to Athens to study, and educated Romans spoke Greek. The Roman poet Horace put it in a famous line: «Captive Greece took her fierce conqueror captive». Rome won the wars, but Greek books, art and ideas won over many Romans.

At the Isthmian Games of 196 BC a herald read out a message in the stadium: the Roman Senate and the general Flamininus, having beaten Philip, declared eight Greek peoples free, without garrisons or tribute (Polybius 18.46). The applause was so great that he had to repeat it. Historians still argue over what Rome meant by ἐλευθερία: Greeks heard self-rule, while for Rome it may have meant small, divided cities, each on its own.

It did not last. After Pydna, over a thousand Achaeans accused of siding with Perseus were sent to Italy; sixteen years later, at most three hundred remained (Pausanias 7.10). Polybius was one of the detainees. He got to know Roman leaders and wrote his history of Rome's rise in Greek.

In 146 BC, after war with the Achaean League, Lucius Mummius stormed Corinth and set it on fire. Most people found there were killed, and the women and children were sold as slaves (Pausanias 7.16). Corinth lay deserted until Julius Caesar refounded it as a Roman colony around 44 BC (Strabo 8.6.23). How Greece was governed at first is debated. For 27 BC, Cassius Dio lists «Greece with Epirus» as a province (ἐπαρχία); Pausanias calls its governor's province Achaea.

The famous line is in Horace, Epistles 2.1.156–157: Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio, «captive Greece took her fierce conqueror captive and brought the arts to rustic Latium». It is a poet's view, not a history of the conquest. Horace also says that Athens added to his education, and that he looked for truth «in the groves of Academus» (Epistles 2.2.43–45).

The conquest could be brutal. For his siege of 87–86 BC Sulla cut down the trees of the Academy, then stormed Athens with terrible slaughter (Plutarch, Sulla 12–14). Hadrian was different: he completed the temple of Olympian Zeus, dedicating it in 131/132 AD, more than six centuries after work had begun. In 267 AD the Heruli sacked Athens.

Greek stayed a language of learning. Plutarch of Chaeronea wrote paired lives of Greeks and Romans. Epictetus, born a slave, taught at Nicopolis. Galen of Pergamon practised medicine in Rome and wrote in Greek. Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations in Greek too.

Greeks gave old words new jobs. In Polybius's proclamation the Senate is ἡ σύγκλητος and Flamininus is στρατηγὸς ὕπατος, the Greek rendering of a consul's title. A province was an ἐπαρχία, and αὐτοκράτωρ came to mean the emperor. All of them are alive: the Σύγκλητος governs a Greek university, the Ύπατη Αρμοστεία is the UN refugee agency, and επαρχία also means «the countryside». The Roman road Strabo calls ἡ Ἐγνατία ὁδός (7.7.4) gave its name to the motorway Εγνατία Οδός, though the routes differ.

The greatest change was a name. In 212 AD Caracalla made the free people of the empire Roman citizens; Cassius Dio (78.9) thought he wanted more tax money. The people we call Byzantines called themselves Ῥωμαῖοι and their state Ρωμανία. In popular speech Ρωμαίος gradually became Ρωμιός, and the scholar Manolis Triantafyllidis explains how a political name came to mean a Greek. Historians still debate what kind of identity this was and how widely it was shared, and how some of these «Romans» became Hellenes again.