22 – Roman Founders, Roman Fables – Classical Mythology (Vol 23) by Elizabeth Vandiver
Run time: 30:14 / 2011-01-04
(Transcribed with the help of AI – S. Guraziu, Oct. 2025 – Video embedded, source IntArchive, Nov. 2023)
Elizabeth Vandiver – Hello and welcome back to lecture 22. In the previous lecture we talked about myths dealing with anomalous females such as the Amazons, Medea and many different monsters and discussed how those myths reflect Greek society and helped also to construct the understanding of Greek society. In this lecture, we’re going to turn from Greek culture to Roman culture and look at the uses that the Romans made of the myths they inherited or borrowed from the Greeks.
Now as i said in the very first lecture classical mythology is so called because the myths in question appear in both greek and roman literature and art mythology was not the only borrowing that the romans made from greek culture rome took over and adapted to its own uses all sorts of greek categories of culture philosophy rhetoric history epic tragedy, their forms of art, their method of making statuary.
In all of these areas, Rome borrowed from Greece and modified Greek originals to its own purposes. Now, the reason for this, the reason that Rome borrowed so much and so directly from Greece has a great deal to do, among other things, with the chronology of the two cultures. Again, I mentioned this briefly in the very first lecture that Greece was the first culture, Rome was the second.
Greece preceded Rome as a culture of note and importance in the Mediterranean. Rome was founded, the city of Rome, which became the center of Roman power, was founded in 753 BC, in the 8th century BC.
At that point, most Greek city-states were already ancient. Just to put it in context, this is about the same time that Hesiod was probably writing Theogony and Works in Days, about the same time, give or take 50 years in either direction, that the Homeric epics were probably being written down. That is the time when Rome was actually founded. Athens Zenith, the high point of Athenian culture, as we’ve mentioned before, was during the 5th century BC.
About 300 years after the founding of Rome. This means that as Rome was gaining in importance, as Rome was coming into ascendancy in the Mediterranean culture, Athenian power was waning. So Greek culture becomes less important politically and economically speaking as Roman culture becomes more important.
In the fourth century BC, after the high point of the fifth century, Athens and Greece both came under the domination of Philip, king of Macedon, and later of Philip’s son, Alexander, whom we know as Alexander the Great.
Alexander the Great’s death in 323 BC is the date that historians normally point to as the end of the classical age in Greece. Now, that’s purely a convention to make historical periodization easier for historians. It’s not a matter of everyone waking up one day in 323 BC and saying, oh, I guess the classical age is over now. But that is the date that we fix upon to delineate the difference between classical and post-classical Greece.
From 323 BC with the death of Alexander the Great up to 31 BC we refer to the Hellenistic age or the Hellenistic period of Greek culture. And during this period of about 300 years, again 323 to 31 BC are the conventional limits of the Hellenistic age, Greece is less important politically and economically than it had been in the classical age, has less political control and domination. But Hellenistic Greece was still remarkably fruitful culturally.