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Athens After Empire
A History from Alexander the Great to the Emperor Hadrian
Ian Worthington,FSA, FRHistS
From Our Blog
The question of whether Athens was a Greek or Roman city seems straightforward, but among scholars there is some debate.
Posted on June 10, 2021
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The Athenians were in a panic in 490 BC. A Persian army had landed at Marathon, on the coastline east of Athens, intent on capturing the city and even conquering all Greece. The famous battle of Marathon was Athens' coming of age as a military power; a decade later its navy helped to block another Persian invasion (led by Xerxes), a stepping-stone to Athens' rise as a wealthy imperial power.
Posted on November 17, 2020
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Roman civilization is one of the foundation stones of our own western culture, and we are often exposed in newspaper and magazine articles, books, and even TV documentaries to the glories of Roman art, architecture, literature (the chances are you've read Virgil's Aeneid), rhetoric (we've all heard of Cicero), even philosophy. Yet in the late first century BC the Roman poet Horace wrote: 'Captive Greece captured her rude conqueror and introduced her arts to the crude Latin lands' (Epistle 2.1.156). Did he really mean that Rome owed its cultural and intellectual heritage to the Greeks?
Posted on November 22, 2020
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