The Romans had mixed feelings about their conquered neighbors. On the one hand, they eagerly took advantage of Greek contributions in arts and science and borrowed heavily from Greek mythology. Athens and the Hel-lenized Egyptian city of Alexandria remained centers of higher education, and most educated people spoke Greek. The first Roman emperor, Augustus (63 B. C.E.-14 C. E.), wrote his memoirs in Greek, and the Romans absorbed many Greek words into Latin. Yet educated Greek speakers such as Augustus tried not to publicly display too much admiration for Greece. The Romans felt pride in their own accomplishments, and some Romans considered the Greeks to be immoral and inferior.
Romans might have decried how Hellenized they became, but their embrace of Greek culture helped spread it to new parts of the world. At its peak, the Roman Empire stretched from Great Britain to the Middle East, from North Africa to Germany. The Romans did not conquer as wide a swath as Alexander had, but their control endured longer. Through that dominance, a culture known today as Greco-Roman combined the best that both Rome and Classical Greece had to offer.
Saving Sculpture
Modern art lovers are fortunate that Rome was so enamored of its Greek lands and their culture, since the Romans helped preserved the Greek artistic tradition. Much of the Greeks' free standing sculpture was cast in bronze, most of which did not last. Roman artists made copies of these works in marble, and many of them still exist today.
In Roman society, Greeks held a number of important jobs, though they often performed their duties as slaves. The Greeks dominated medicine, thanks to the early influence of Hippocrates and his followers (see chapter 6). After Hippocrates, the most important physician of the classical world was Galen (129-c. 200 C. E.). Born in the Greek city of Perga-mum, he came to Rome around 164 C. E. Galen proved, among other things, that urine flows from the kidneys, and he wrote the first major book on anatomy. For centuries, doctors in Europe and the Middle East considered him their most influential source.
Ptolemy (c. 90-c. 168 C. E.) was a famous Greek mathematician and astronomer. He wrote a book that argued that the sun and planets revolve around Earth. He was wrong, but his idea was accepted for almost 1,500 years, and the word Ptolemaic refers to his system for explaining the workings of the universe.
World History
