At this point, the story of Greece normally comes to an end. Yet decline is in many ways as important as rise, and the story of the decline of Greece is in many ways almost as interesting as its rise.
The Romans loved Greece.
At this point, the story of Greece normally comes to an end. Yet decline is in many ways as important as rise, and the story of the decline of Greece is in many ways almost as interesting as its rise.
The Romans loved Greece. Horace expressed it well in his epistle to Augustus, outlining the story of Latin Literature...
Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artis
Intulit agresti Lati
Captured Greece captured her fierce victor and brought the arts to rustic Latium...
– Horace Ep 2.1.156
Athens in particular had immense prestige and flourished as a university town. It took some time to find its niche – in the 80s BC it backed the wrong side and supported Mithridates, and was sacked by Sulla in 86 BC as a result. It backed the wrong side too when it backed Mark Anthony against Augustus, but Augustus soon forgave it and major changes took place. The Agora was transformed: a new market place was begun by Caesar, to the east of the Agora, and the agora itself was turned into something of a museum.
A huge Odeion or concert hall built by Agrippa took up most of the south half, while to the north a temple of Ares was built, or rather re-erected. It was a temple of the 5th century BC – we do not know where it stood originally – but it was demolished and re-erected in the Agora. Together these buildings transformed the Agora into something more of a museum than a market place, and perhaps rather spoiled the slightly chaotic open space that was the classical agora.
The emperor Nero (AD 54-68) was also a great supporter of Greece. He fancied himself as an artistic performer and presented himself as a competitor in the Olympic Games, for which technically he was not eligible not being a Greek. But he was the Emperor so scruples about eligibility were swept away, and inevitably he won all the competitions for which he entered. We cannot quite be certain of the details because the Roman upper classes did not approve and the historians delighted in presenting him as a buffoon, but Greece certainly benefited.
Hadrian (AD 117 – 134) was also an enthusiastic supporter of Greece and particularly Athens where he completed the building of the great temple to Olympian Zeus which had been begun in the 6th century BC, but had never been completed.
Sparta too flourished by turning itself into a tourist destination. Whereas Athens was the destination for Roman intellectuals, Sparta was the place for the Roman hearties. No less than three sets of games were instituted so the Roman visitors could claim they had competed with the best at the Spartan games. A theatre was built which is today the best preserved classical monument in Sparta and the shrine of Artemis Othia was renovated. As we have already noted the ancient shrine of Othia was the place where ritual floggings took place to ensure that Spartan youths were toughened up, but this too became a tourist attraction in the Festival of the Whips – it is after all splendid sport to watch young boys being flogged– but the shrine was surrounded by seating to form a theatre, and it is in the mounds formed by the new seating arrangements that the bronze figurines that testify to the artistic abilities of Sparta in the 8th and 7th century BC were preserved.
The geography of Greece was also substantially changed by a Roman re-organisation. Whereas mainland Greece had hitherto looked eastwards across the Aegean Sea to the Greek cities of Anatolia (modern Turkey), Greece now began to face westwards to Italy and Rome. Greece was divided into three provinces. The main province was Achaea where the capital was Corinth which had been refounded in 46 BC as a Roman province, and thus for most of the Roman period, Corinth rivalled Athens in size and in importance. But there were two new towns on the western coast: Patras at the north west corner of the Peloponnese became the main port for sailing to Italy, as it still is today. And then in north western Greece, Augustus founded a new town at Nicopolis (the city of victory), near the site of the Battle of Actium where he finally defeated Mark Anthony.
But by the 3rd century, the standard history of Greece becomes a story of decline and fall. In AD 267 the Heruli invaded. The Heruli were a Germanic or perhaps Scythian people who originally lived north of the Black Sea, but they erupted into Greece and caused widespread devastation. Then a century later in 395, Alaric and his Goths invaded Greece and sacked both Athens and Corinth, in what was to be a trial run for his greatest triumph twenty years later when in 410 he finally sacked Rome itself thereby bringing the Roman Empire to the first of its many “falls”
Nevertheless Athens continued to flourish as the home of Neo-Platonism, the most highbrow of the pagan philosophies. The end came in 529 when the emperor Justinian outlawed all paganism and thus effectively brought the intellectual life of Athens to an end. The physical end came in the 580s when the Slavs invaded and some of them at least settled. In the 7th century the Agora was finally ab