Legacy of the Greek and Roman Worlds

Legacy of the Greek and Roman Worlds

            It can be argued that today’s Western world owes it’s foundations to the ideas put forth by the Greek and the Roman civilizations.  Many concepts were originated by the Greeks, who then were adopted into the Roman Empire by ancestry and military conquest.  The Romans took their military campaigns to all corners of their world and spread this culture to what would become the center of the old world in northern Europe .  The ancestors of the modern day civilizations (kingdoms in Great Britain , Prussia , Gaul , etc.) were directed influenced by the Roman expansion into what would be their territories. 

            The root of this story begins with the Mycenaeans.  These peoples were amongst the first to populate the Greek peninsula in a way that would foreshadow the Greek civilization we know.  Some of these peoples, however, also would travel to the Italian peninsula (and other places) where that same influence would later affect the Roman culture.  It is here that we see a connection between the Greeks and the Romans for the first time: they share common cultural ancestry.  In Greece , the Mycenaeans will establish settlements on the sites of future Greek city-states (such as Athens , Corinth , and Sparta ).  In Italia, they would transfer aspects of their culture to the Etruscans, who then transfer these proto-Greek ideals and ideas to the Italian tribes destined to become the Romans.

            While the Italian tribes at the future site of Rome follow their path, the proto-Greeks are developing.  As the Greeks, several concepts were explored, key concepts.  The idea of the Polis was developed all across the peninsula.  That is, one unified community ideology around which all citizens of a city-state gathered, was formed.  Where-ever the citizens went the Polis, and the cultural ideals, followed. 

Political experimentation was commonplace in all of these distanced city-states.  Each tested different systems, all of them arriving at different conclusions at different times.  This experimentation allowed the Greeks to come up with what worked “best” for the most people.  Famously, Athens was the first place (that we know of) where democracy worked.  Naturally it was a slightly altered democracy in which the small percentage of people who were citizens could vote; but everything was voted on. 

The way people thought was also revolutionized by the Greeks.  Up until this point, all other civilizations we have record of, attributed most of the happenings in their universe to their religions.  When the Greeks emerged, they began to look at their world with logic, rather than religion.  A group of philosophers named the Pre-Socratics explained the natural world around them using observation, logic, critical thinking, and deduction.  People like Pythagoras (Pythagorean Theorem) and Democritus (atomic theory) pioneered the way humans perceived the world around them.  They essentially set the ground work for our modern scientific method.  The Socratics took new approaches to figure out how the human mind worked, what was behind ethics, emotions, and thoughts.  A question often looming over each philosopher was: how can we know anything in a world that is constantly in flux?  People such as Plato and Aristotle took stabs at it, attempting to assign practical answers, while avoiding “deus ex machine” style answers like “God did it.” 

Unfortunately, the Greeks also set a precedent for the downfall of a civilization.  After the Persian Wars, Athens was charged with collecting money from the other city-states to spend on protection for the Greek world.  This is where one of the biggest and earliest recorded cases of corruption changed a possibly glorious path.  Athens misused the funds and this sparked civil wars, dubbed the Peloponnesian Wars.  It tore the Greek Peninsula apart, and that is when King Philip of Macedonia came in and took the prize while no one was looking; and that is the end of the Greek Empire that never was.  It was during this Macedonian rule that the Greek and the Roman worlds collide once again.

While the Greeks rose and fell, the Romans were making their mark as well.  By the time the Macedonians had established firm rule for several generations, the Romans had developed into a civilization all their own.  After a scandal by the Etruscans against the Roman tribe, the Patricians of Rome rose up against them and expelled them, making Rome its own official entity.  Using military ingenuity, Rome was able to conquer the Italian peninsula, Hispania, and eventually the Carthaginian Empire.  It was during the second war with Carthage (Second Punic War) that Rome came into contact once again with its Greek cousins.  King Philip the Fifth of Macedonia-Greece joined the Second Punic War on the side of Carthage , and lost miserably.  Rome gained control of their entire empire, and spread further west to Ionia .  The Romans loved the Greek culture (which the Macedonians kept alive) and adopted many of their cultural attributes themselves.  Rome had become an empire, and it owned the entire Mediterranean Sea . 

To Rome , we can credit many military innovations.  The Legion was perhaps the tool which made them the seemingly unstoppable force they were perceived as on the battle field.  This idea of a self-sufficient military unit which could travel and conquer abroad (without “phoning” home) came about as a result of being sacked years earlier by the Gauls.  It was with this new unit that Rome was able to conquer the lands that it did.  The Legion was so versatile that it even succeeded when called to build the first Roman navy against a people ( Carthage ) used to sea faring.  The Romans won.

Another military legacy left behind by the Romans was the change in how the army worked, brought about by Emperor Augustus.  It created the career path in the military, which had not been seen by Rome before.  After twenty years of enlistment, a soldier was given land and money to live off of.  The army had become an avenue of advancement.  This legacy can be seen even today in the United States military, which has a similar system.  Until recently, it even had the same time span before retirement (it has now changed to twenty-five years instead of twenty).

During the change from BCE to Common Era, Christianity was born in the Roman kingdom from the surfacing of Joshua Ben Joseph.  This new belief (stemming off of Judaism) was highly scorned, at first.  When Diocletian takes control, he sanctions the official persecution of Christians (whose word has by this time spread).  It is not until Constantine takes control of the empire and begins to favor Christianity that it becomes accepted, and ultimately (with Theodosius) accepted as the official religion of Rome .  Theodosius gives the Church tax breaks, land, and generally anything they could need to be self-sustaining.  This leads the Church to be the last remaining institution of the Roman Empire today.

Today we can see the influence of the Romans and the Greeks all around us.  In the United States of America , much of the architecture in state and national capitals is Greek and Roman.  This is also the case in other parts of the world.  The philosophies brought forth for the first time by Socrates, Plato, Democritus, and others, are still affecting modern thought today.  Concepts like the scientific method and even many psychological ideas still remain from the Greek origination.  Some of the military ideas brought forth by the Romans also still survive, such as the military career.  Their culture is a major talking point in any university in the western world, and its legacies are taught as a mandatory part of the curriculum in many places.  Even the new form of urbanism which they introduced is still pervasive today.  It can easily be argued that the Greek and the Roman worlds were the spark which ignited the modern state of being.