A great deal of literature and especially a great deal of art was produced by Greece during the Hellenistic period. So as Rome’s political power was growing, especially in the fourth, third, second, and on into the first centuries BC, the Romans would have come into contact with the Greeks of the Hellenistic age, would have interacted with them, seen their artwork, read their literature, and so forth, another point of contact between rome and greece or between roman culture and greek culture was the numerous colonies of southern well central and southern Italy colonies that had been founded by greek settlers from the 8th to the 5th centuries B.C. many greek cities sent out colonists to this area of Italy, the area around and south of Naples.
In fact, there were so many Greek cities, colonies of Greek cities back in Greece that were founded in Italy, so many colonies, that this area of Italy around and south of Naples came to be called Magna Graecia, which in Latin simply means great or large Greece. So the Romans, as they were developing in the the part of Italy where Rome is located, north of Naples, would have had constant and undoubtedly very important contacts with the cities of Magna Graecia.
Rome itself was never a Greek colony. That city was not founded by Greek colonists. But as Roman power spread in Italy, particularly in the fourth century, the Romans would have interacted a great deal with the ethnically Greek, Greek-speaking, culturally Greek people of Magna Graecia.
Finally, in 146 BC, Rome conquered Greece and Greece then became a Roman province. That means that Greece then came under direct governmental control by Rome. So throughout this period of several centuries, as Greece is waning in political power and Rome is rising, Roman and Greek culture intermeshes, they interact with one another, they talk back and forth with each other and the Romans are exposed over and over again to Greek cultural forms and artifacts such as their literature, their drama, their art and so on.
Now all of this that I’ve said so far explains how the Romans could come into contact with Greek culture, but it doesn’t explain why they borrowed so much of that culture wholesale, why they simply lifted forms of literature and content of things such as mythology from Greece and adapted it into their own culture. Trying to describe why that happened, we’re on uncertain ground. All I can do is offer a few possible explanations.
First off, the Romans had an image of themselves as practical, down-to-earth people. Remember Ovid’s description of his own people, the Romans, as descendants of the stones that Eucalion and Pyrrha threw over their shoulders. And we talked before about how that implied that they were a hardy race, that people who were descended from those stones were hardy. It also probably reflects the idea that they’re plain, down-to-earth matter-of-fact, earthy in that sense.
Perhaps this practicality on which the Romans prided themselves expressed itself in simply adapting Greek models rather than reinventing the wheel, so to speak. Why figure out how to write epic? Greece has already done it. Let’s just borrow the idea. Why develop our own native dramatic tradition? Greece has already done that too.
Let’s just borrow the idea and so on. Another possibility is that it simply may not have occurred to the Romans not to mimic Greek cultural ideas. In this regard, the influence of Greece on Rome has often been compared to the influence of England on the United States, that Greece was seen sort of as a parent culture or a mother country in some regard, from which the Romans simply naturally took over cultural forms and cultural means of expression.
Well maybe, but that is a somewhat flawed analogy because of course when the United States began, now I’m not talking here about Native American cultures, but when the United States itself began, the people in power, the government and those writing literature, weren’t just borrowing from England, they were English. And so naturally, the earliest English settlers in New England continued to use their own cultural forms rather than inventing new ones.
But the relationship between Greece and Rome is not quite that simple or straightforward. We don’t really know. It is an odd thing for one culture to take over most of its cultural means of expression wholesale from another one. And we don’t really know why exactly the Romans decided to do this.
One of the strangest or perhaps most surprising cultural borrowings is that Rome took over a great deal of its religion and especially of its mythology directly from Greece. Now, there were without doubt native Italian and Roman gods and native stories about them. As far as anthropologists and historians can tell, there has never yet been a human culture that did not develop some stories about some kinds of gods or divinities, and the Romans were no exception.
We know that there were native Roman and Italian gods and that they did have stories attached to them and some of those gods survived and were recorded in literature and some of them we know about. An example would be the god Janus, god of doors and of beginnings, a god with two faces, one on either side of his head because he looks both backwards and forwards as a door looks. And, of course, it’s Janus who gives us the name of the first month of our year. January comes from his name, a month that looks both backwards and forwards.
Most of the native Roman gods that we know about, however, tended to be minor local deities. By that, I mean that if people who lived in a particular little town outside Rome had a particular god of a hill or a grove or a lake or a stream, they probably continued to refer to that god by his native Italian name and did not assimilate him to a Greek god. And furthermore, the Romans also kept their belief throughout their culture as far as we know in their specific household and family gods.
In particular, in two different types of gods called the Leres and Panates, who were seen as being protective spirits of individual families and individual households. And in some excavated Roman houses, particularly in Pompeii and in Ostia, an area near Rome, you can still see shrines set in the walls where offerings were given to the Leres and Panates.
But when it comes to the major deities, the Olympians, the really main and very important gods, there the Romans assimilated their native gods to the Greek ones. By that I mean that the Romans already had, as part of their native tradition, a main god named Jupiter.
As they came into contact with Greek culture, the Romans began to say to themselves something along the lines of, oh, what we call Jupiter, the Greeks call Zeus. They have all these stories about Zeus.
Let’s now take those stories and tell them about Jupiter. Idea is that instead of maintaining their own native original stories about their major gods and goddesses and saying maybe these are the same deities the Greeks worship, maybe they’re not, as Greece did with, say, Egypt, the Romans assumed that their gods were the same ones Greece worshipped, but then they took over the Greek stories wholesale. And this means for our purposes that very frequently a particular account of a Greek God, we will know through the writings of a Roman author.
And this is also why if you look in a modern handbook of classical mythology, you’ll find listings that say things like Zeus, parentheses, Jupiter, or Jupiter, see under Zeus. We say in handbooks of mythology that Zeus and Jupiter are the same God, Hera and Juno are the same goddess, and so on.
Originally they weren’t. Originally they came from these two very separate cultures, but the Romans decided that their gods were the same as the Greek gods and used the same stories about them. Now, despite the extent of their cultural borrowings from Greece, the Romans had, pretty much throughout their history, a strongly ambivalent attitude towards Greece and Greek culture. On the one hand, the Romans saw the Greeks as better artists, poets, rhetoricians, so on and so forth than they themselves were.