Greek Heritage

I always got confused by Greek and Roman history.

You learn about these great and amazing civilizations that were powerful and predominant thousands of years ago, but you don't think about the timeline. I started thinking about the timing of the civilizations and wondering what order things happened.

The cultures overlapped, as it turns out.

Greeks were not exactly conquered and subjugated by Romans all at once. The Greeks weakened themselves through Civil War and continuous internal squabbling, which allowed the Romans to take them over. Greeks were not usually a single unified entity, except briefly under Alexander. Years after he was gone, the Greek world was a series of separately ruled areas, always in revolt internally, and competing between the regions.

Rather than being completely defeated and overrun, then killed and enslaved, they suffered a different fate than many areas subjugated by the Romans. They ended up with a deal where their surrender allowed them to have some autonomy. The Romans admired Greek culture and learning, and since is was part of Roman scholarly culture, they did not want to wipe it out entirely. While the Romans understood that the Greeks were completely subjugated, just allowed more freedom, the Greeks continued for a while as if they actually had these freedoms. By the time they figured out that they were not really free, the Roman Republic was huge, controlling most of the known world. Their special status as a relatively free province came to an end under Sulla, and the Greeks were reorganized into the Province of Achaea.

Throughout their long ancient history, the Greeks were amazing historians and scientists. They figured out a great deal of the basic sciences simply by reasoning it out. They were meticulous at record keeping, and preserved much of their accumulated knowledge in writing.

So the Greeks, while not as successfully savage as the Romans, in some ways persisted longer than the Romans. Their ideas and ways of thinking continued to predominate long after they were just a part of the Roman Empire.

I never really thought about "Greek Society" as it is applies to modern college students. We have fraternities and sororities, and I never understood the actual connection to the Greeks. I just knew that they used Greek letters for their names. I think that using Greek culture as a template for modern university groups is an acknowledgement to the fact that the Greeks were true lovers of knowledge. Any person going to college is expected to embrace learning for learning's sake, as the ancient Greeks did.

Later, they still valued pure scholarship at a time when the Romans had set up a system of education that guaranteed that most Romans would disdain learning. As a result, the Greeks were often brought in to run the day to day administration of the Roman Empire. There were many more qualified literate Greeks than Romans. In a way, the Greeks were in charge of the Romans rather than completely subjugated. Their control of the Roman bureaucracy was almost complete, and while they were nominally the servants, there is no doubt that they had considerable influence in the way the Roman Empire was run on a day to day basis.