The Greeks and their Neighbors: The Hellenization of the Mediterranean From the Homeric Age to Augustus

Although the Romans come to mind most immediately as the people who absorbed and passed on the achievements of Greek civilization to the Western world, the transmission of Greek culture to Western posterity was a far more complex process involving various other peoples. Already during the early first millennium BC, Greek culture began to affect the neighboring peoples to the east, such as the Phrygians, Lydians, and Lycians, as well as the Greeks’ western neighbors in Italy: the Etruscans and Romans. In time, the Phoenicians and their western colony of Carthage and the western regions of the great Persian Empire would increasingly come to adopt many aspects of Greek material culture, art, and religion—even before the Asiatic conquests of Alexander the Great and his successors. It was this long and varied process that the Romans gradually inherited and fused into a pan-Mediterranean Greco-Roman Pax Romana, beginning with Augustus. The course will examine this process from the perspective of artistic monuments and literary or historical sources, as well.