The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Roman Empire Read Online Free Page A

1204 by its Latin Christian brothers in the Crusades and then taken by the Muslims in 1453. Refugees and migrants from Byzantium brought Greek literature and learning with them to Italian cities such as Venice and Florence and helped to fuel the emerging Italian Renaissance.
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    Â  Great Caesar’s Ghost! The city of Byzantium was founded by Greeks around 667 B . C . E . Torn back and forth between Greeks and Persians in the classical period, the city remained Greek until captured by the Romans in C . E . 196. Constantine refounded the city as “New Rome” in 330, but it quickly became known as “Constantine’s city,” or Constantinopole. The modern name, Istanbul, reportedly comes from the Greek eis tēn polin , which means “to the city.” This was apparently the common answer to a question, “So, where ya’ headed?” asked of Greeks traveling along the provincial roads for over a thousand years.
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Roman Literature in a Box
    Latin literature was slow out of the blocks in comparison to other cultures such as the Greeks. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, for example, were composed sometime around 750 B . C . E ., just about the same time as the traditional date of the founding of Rome. Classical Greek literature hit its high point roughly between 450–350 B . C . E . during the time when the Roman Republic was tottering about on its first marching legs. Itwasn’t until the mid-third century (300–200) B . C . E . that the Romans began to cultivate a literature of their own.
    A comparative timeline of Roman history and literature.

    There are several reasons for the late start. First, the Romans were a practical people focused on action. They saw themselves as hard-working, hard-fighting, practical, salt-of-the-earth farmers who had little time for literature and other idle-headed activities. Romans, in the public sphere, served the state through war or politics. Anything that distracted from those tasks was suspect. The strength of this attitude shows up in great authors like Cicero and the historian Sallust, who still felt compelled to defend the value of literature in relation to one’s public life and value.
    Maturity is also a factor. A culture needs time to develop its own literature. There have to be enough people with a common language and culture, a shared appreciation of literary forms, and a sufficient level of literacy. The rapidly expanding Roman state did not assemble these until the third century B . C . E . The Romans were too busy conquering Italy, Greece, and Carthage to put things down on paper. Once they started, however, they made up for lost time. And although the Romans imitated the Greeks at the beginning, their literature quickly took on a stamp and character that, like everything else they did, were very much their own.
Early Latin Literature (ca 300–100 B . C . E .)
    Early Latin literature is characterized by two things: experimentation with and adaptation of Greek forms to the Latin language and the emergence of a Roman perspective. The first writers and educators of this period were Greeks from southern Italy, who were brought to Rome as slaves of conquest. Soon, however, the Greek literary forms of epic, comedy, tragedy, and history were in the hands of Latin authors, and philosophy and rhetoric began to develop a distinctive Roman approach.
The Golden Age (ca 100 B . C . E .–Death of Augustus in C . E . 14)
    Turmoil marked the last century of the Republic. Civil unrest and civil wars erupted from a social and cultural system struggling to maintain control over its dominions and its own power. Amid the turmoil, Roman literature not only survived but seems to have risen to the challenge of its times (to fashion a more comprehensive role and identity for Rome and the Romans in the world) in a way that the Roman political system did not. Latin poetry, history, philosophy, and rhetoric were transformed by authors such as