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:''In modern Olympic and amateur wrestling, Greco-Roman wrestling is a particular style and variation.''
The 'Greco-Roman' period of history refers to the culture of the peoples who were incorporated into the Roman Republic and Roman Empire.

Contents

History

Education

Politics

See also

History

The time period begins with the Roman occupation of Greece in 146 BC and the subsequent merging of the Roman and Hellinistic cultures. The end of this period is a point of academic debate. The "classical" Greco-Roman period ends with the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD. However, the Greco-Roman civilization continued in the East for another millenium (although as with all civilizations it changed over time). Terms such as Greco-Roman World are also coined by scholars to denote the geographical borders of the culture's impact. After the Punic Wars, Greco-Roman civilization dominated permanently over the Carthago-phoenician areas and the entire Mediterranean basin.
The Greco-Roman dominion reflects the essential unity of the Mediterranean world at the time when this culture flourished, between the 3rd century BC and the 5th century AD. The Mediterranean was considered by Romans "mare nostrum" or a "lacus Romanus," but their political hegemony began with the first Punic war in 263 BC. Prior to that period, the Greeks and Phoenicians were the most notable traders whose ships worked their way across the Mediterranean and even beyond, establishing emporia and colonies in their wake. In Western Europe the conventional terminating datum point is the year 476 AD, when emperor Romulus Augustulus of Rome was deposed by non-Roman forces. In the succeeding centuries the notion of a common Greco-Roman culture in the Mediterranean became more and more distant from reality.
There are many indicators in the social matrix of classical antiquity that give evidence of common heritage. Probably the single most important indicator is the alphabet, since it has become the most ubiquitous artifact of that culture.

Education

In the schools of philosophy and rhetoric, the foundations of education were transmitted throughout the lands of Greek and Roman rule. Within its educated class, spanning all of the "Greco-Roman" era, the testimony of literary borrowings and influences is overwhelming proof of a mantle of mutual knowledge. For example, several hundred papyrus volumes found in a Roman villa at Herculaneum are in Greek. From the lives of Cicero and Julius Caesar, it is known that Romans frequented the schools in Greece. The installation both in Greek and Latin of Augustus' monumental eulogy, the Res Gestae, is a proof of official recognition for the dual vehicles of the common culture. The familiarity of figures from Roman legend and history in the "Parallel Lives" composed by Plutarch is one example of the extent to which "universal history" was then synonymous with the accomplishments of famous Latins and Hellenes. Most Romans were likely bilingual in Greek and Latin.

Politics

Rome became the superpower of its age in the political and legal spheres, and by its military might, the enormous Roman state created an enduring amalgam of disparate peoples and bestowed relative peace and prosperity on those peoples.
Caesar plundered and enslaved without apology. However, he also invited many Gallic leaders to join him in Rome as members of the Roman Senate. The requirements of manpower in arms meant that citizenship was extended to non-Romans who served in Roman legions. By 211 AD, with Caracalla's edict known as the ''Constitutio Antoniniana'', the general populace came into possession of citizenship. As a result, even after the city of Rome fell, the people of what remained of the empire (referred to by many historians as the Byzantine Empire) continued to call themselves Romans ("Romaioi" in the Greek language which eventually became the empire's official language).
The imperial Roman state was a vast social experiment in hybridization. Imperial Rome is identified with the cultural legacy of its forebears; it sustained that tradition without innovation, until Constantine broke away from the attenuated religion of the Greco-Roman past and transformed Rome's cultural matrix by acknowledging the faith of a persecuted minority. The life of Constantine is arguably a better terminus of the Greco-Roman age than any other; it may equally be considered as the herald of the Middle Ages.

See also

★ Classical antiquity