The Greeks An Introduction to Their Culture, 3rd edition

customs provided that they paid their taxes and thus recognized the authority of the
king. The Maccabees took up arms and regained their religious freedom after the
death of Antiochus. Not long after, Judaea gained independence, which lasted for the
most part until the Romans took over in 68.

The Romans take over

In the late third century, the Romans became involved in a series of wars against
the Macedonians, which started when their king Philip V allied himself with the
Carthaginian leader Hannibal in 214. The second of these wars ended decisively in
the Romans’ favour, when in 197 they defeated King Philip V at Cynocephalae in
Thessaly in a battle that demonstrated the limitations of the Macedonian phalanx in
opposition to the more flexible Roman legion. The Romans finally defeated the
Carthaginians in the east and the Macedonians in the west in 146, destroying the
cities of Carthage and then Corinth in the same year, after which Greece became a
Roman protectorate. Roman intervention in the east finished off the remnants of the
Seleucid empire, weakened by earlier failed conflicts with the Macedonians and
the Ptolemies, and by civil war and the secession of eastern states. With the annexa-
tion of Egypt by Augustus after the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at the battle of
Actium in 31 BC, all the old Hellenistic kingdoms had become part of the Roman
empire.
Hellenism already rooted in the west now spread further as the Greeks began to
educate and civilize their less cultivated conquerors. This process began when the
Romans encountered Greek culture directly after the battle of Tarentum in 270, which
gave them control of magna Graecia. Rome subsequently became home to captives
from the war. One such was a Greek slave called Andronicus who took the name of
his master Livius and taught Greek to his master’s sons by means of a translation of
Homer. The Latin Odysseyof Livius Andronicus continued to be used as a schoolbook.
As the Roman poet Horace (65–68) put it in the Augustan age:

Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes

Intulit agresti Latio

Conquered Greece conquered her savage victor and brought the arts into rustic

Latium

(Epistles 2, 1, 156–157)

Athens continued to be a beacon of learning in the ancient world, a kind of university
town perhaps. The great Roman orator Cicero, for example, was a student of philos-
ophy and oratory there as a young man for six months in the third decade of the first

HISTORY 91