Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
settlement and enterprise, and united by Greek learning, language and culture, if not
always by a single power, this
Hellenistic Empire
enormously increased international
trade and created unprecedented prosperity.
Asked on his deathbed to whom he bequeathed his empire, Alexander replied “To the
strongest”. Forty years of warfare between his leading generals gave rise to three
dynasties, the
Antigonid
in Macedonia, which ruled over mainland Greece, the
Seleucid
which ultimately centred on Syria and Asia Minor, and the
Ptolemaic
in
Egypt, ruled from Alexandria, founded by Alexander himself, which in wealth and
population, not to mention literature and science, soon outshone anything in Greece.
Meanwhile, in the Western Mediterranean,
Rome
was a rising power.
Philip V
of
Macedonia had agreed a treaty of mutual assistance against Rome with Hannibal. After
Hannibal's defeat. Rome's legions marched eastwards, and routed Philip's army at
Cynoscephalae
in Thessaly in 197 BC.
Roman Greece: 146 BC-330 AD
Rome was initially well disposed towards Greece, which they regarded as the
originator of much of their culture, and granted autonomy to the existing city-states.
However, after a number of uprisings, the country was divided into
Roman provinces
from 146 BC.
During the first century BC Rome was riven by civil wars, many of whose climactic
battlefields were in Greece: in 49 BC
Julius Caesar
defeated his rival Pompey at
Pharsalus
in Thessaly; in 42 BC Caesar's assassins were beaten by
Mark Antony
and
Octavian
at
Philippi
in Macedonia; and in 31 BC
Antony
and his Ptolemaic ally
Cleopatra
were routed by
Octavian
in a sea battle off
Actium
in western Greece. The
latter effectively marked the birth of the
Roman Empire
- an empire that in its eastern
half continued to speak Greek.
By the first century AD Greece had become a
tourist destination
for well-to-do
Romans; they went to Athens and Rhodes to study literature and philosophy, and
toured the country to see the temples with their paintings and sculpture. They also
visited the by now thoroughly professional
Olympic Games
. When the emperor
Nero
came to Greece in AD 67, he entered the Games as a contestant; the judges prudently
declared him the victor in every competition, even the chariot race, in which he was
thrown and failed to finish.
Barbarian incursions
During the mid-third century the
Heruli
, a tribe from southern Russia, succeeded in
passing through the Bosphorus and into the Aegean. Ravaging far and wide, they
plundered and burned
Athens
in 267. New city walls were built with the marble
rubble from the wreckage, but their circumference was now so small that the ancient
Agora, littered with ruins, was left outside, while what remained of the city huddled
round the base of the Acropolis. It was a familiar scene throughout Greece, as
prosperity declined and population fell. Only in the north along the
Via Egnatia
, the
Roman road linking ports on the Adriatic with Thessaloníki on the Aegean, did
Greece continue to thrive.
117-138
267
395
The reign of Emperor Hadrian, a
hellenophile who left many monuments,
above all his great library and
monumental arch in Athens.
Barbarians pillage
Athens.
Roman empire splits; Greece becomes
part of the eastern, or Byzantine,
empire; Olympic Games suppressed.
