In 146 BC Roman armies sacked Corinth, and Greece passed under Roman rule, later becoming the province of Achaea. Yet the conquerors were themselves captivated. As the Roman poet Horace put it, captive Greece took her fierce conqueror captive and brought the arts to rustic Latium.
A Greek education for Romans
Wealthy Romans learned Greek, studied philosophy in Athens and Rhodes, and filled their villas with copies of Greek statues, many of which survive only in these Roman versions. Greek doctors, teachers and architects worked across the empire, and the eastern half of the Roman world went on speaking and writing Greek. Emperors such as Hadrian lavished buildings on Athens and completed the colossal Temple of Olympian Zeus.
Byzantium
When the emperor Constantine founded Constantinople in AD 330 on the site of the Greek city of Byzantion, the centre of the empire moved east. For more than a thousand years the Byzantine Empire, Christian and Greek-speaking, preserved and copied ancient texts. Many works of Plato, Aristotle and the tragedians have reached us only because Byzantine scribes kept them alive.
The legacy
Scholars who left Byzantium in its final century, and especially after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, helped spark the Renaissance in Italy, where Greek learning was rediscovered with passion. From democracy and philosophy to theatre, mathematics, medicine, architecture and the Olympic Games, revived in Athens in 1896, the world still lives with the inheritance of Ancient Greece.
