Ancient Greece and wine importance. Records inscribed on tablets in Linear B include details of wine, vineyards and wine merchants, as well as an early allusion to Dionysus, the Greek god of wine. Greeks embedded the arrival of winemaking culture in the mythologies of Dionysus and the cultural hero Aristaeus. Early remnants of amphoras show that the Mycenaeans actively traded wine throughout the ancient world in places such as Cyprus, Egypt, Palestine, Sicily and southern Italy. As the Greek city-states established colonies throughout the Mediterranean, the settlers brought grapevines with them and were active in cultivating the wild vines they encountered. Sicily and southern
Names of the Greeks Roman Empire most easterners had come to think of themselves as Christians and, more than ever before, as Romans. Although they may not have liked their government any more than they had previously, the Greeks among them could no longer consider it foreign, run by Latins from Italy. The word "Hellene" itself had already begun to mean a pagan rather than a person of Greek race or culture. Instead eastern Greeks overwhelmingly used the self-identifying term "Rhomaios", "Roman". The term "Byzantine Empire" was introduced in 1557, about a century after the Fall of Constantinople, by German historian Hieronymus Wolf, who