Greece and Rome: Location, Occupations and Expansion – Major Ancient Civilizations (Senior 4 History) | Ganzaa

Major Ancient Civilizations

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Senior 4 · History

Major Ancient Civilizations

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Lesson 1 of 5

Greece and Rome: Location, Occupations and Expansion

25 min

The source: a map of a sea, not of a country

In the 4th century BCE the Athenian philosopher Plato has Socrates describe the Greek world in one image:

"we who dwell in the region extending from the river Phasis to the Pillars of Heracles inhabit a small portion only about the sea, like ants or frogs about a marsh"
Plato, Phaedo, translated by Benjamin Jowett.

The Pillars of Heracles are the Strait of Gibraltar, at the western mouth of the Mediterranean; the Phasis is a river at the far eastern end of the Black Sea. Plato's "marsh" is the sea itself. The map below tests his image. Every Greek city on it sits on a coast, and none lies far inland. In S1 you met Egypt, a civilisation built along one river. Greece and Rome, the two civilisations of this unit, were built around a sea.

No.	Settlement (modern place)	Founded by	When
1	Massalia (Marseille, France)	Phocaea, in Ionia (western Anatolia)	c. 600 BCE
2	Syracuse (Sicily, Italy)	Corinth	733 BCE (date given by Thucydides)
3	Cyrene (Shahhat, Libya)	Thera (Santorini)	late 7th century BCE
4	Byzantium (Istanbul, Türkiye)	Megara, a city-state near Athens	7th century BCE
5	Sinope (Sinop, Türkiye)	Miletus	mid-7th century BCE
6	Naucratis (Nile Delta, Egypt)	Greek traders, on land granted by the pharaoh	7th to 6th century BCE

Definition

Civilisation: a complex society with cities, a system of government, specialised occupations, writing and shared beliefs and arts. Example: Classical Greece had all five, without ever being one state.

City-state (polis, plural poleis): a city and the farmland around it, governing itself as an independent state with its own laws, army and gods. Athens, Sparta and Corinth were poleis.

Colony (Greek: apoikia, "home away"): a new, self-governing city founded overseas by settlers from a mother city (metropolis). A Greek colony was not ruled by its mother city; it kept religious and family ties with it.

Republic: a state with no king, governed by elected officials (Rome from 509 BCE, by tradition). Empire: a state that rules many peoples and lands under one supreme ruler (Rome from 27 BCE). Province: a conquered territory governed and taxed by Rome through an appointed governor.

Location: how the land shaped two civilisations

Greece is a mountainous peninsula with small coastal plains and hundreds of islands in the Aegean Sea. Two facts follow from this. First, the mountains separated one valley from the next, so settlements grew up as small, independent city-states rather than as one kingdom. Historians count this, together with the collapse of the earlier Mycenaean power, as a main reason why the polis became the basic unit of Greek political life in the Archaic period (about 800 to 500 BCE). Second, good farmland was scarce. When a city's population grew, it could not easily push inland, so it looked to the sea.

Rome began as a settlement beside the River Tiber in central Italy, traditionally founded in 753 BCE. Italy has wider plains than Greece, and Rome stood on a river crossing near the coast, in the middle of a peninsula that itself sits in the middle of the Mediterranean. From this centre Rome could move north into Europe, south to Sicily and across a short stretch of sea to Africa.

Occupations: how Greeks and Romans earned a living

Occupation	Greece	Rome
Farming	Olives, grapes for wine and cereals, following the seasons: olives and vines in autumn and winter, cereals harvested in summer. Fertile land was limited.	Grain, olive oil and wine, increasingly on large estates called latifundia that produced for sale.
Trade	From the 6th century BCE, crafts and sea trade became central. Athens depended on grain shipped from the Black Sea.	Sea trade across the whole Mediterranean. After Egypt became a province in 30 BCE, it was a major producer of grain for the empire.
Crafts	Pottery (such as the vase below), metalwork and weapons. One Athenian shield workshop, owned by Lysias, employed 350 enslaved workers.	Workshops, building and engineering (lesson 3).
War	Citizens served as soldiers for their own city-state.	In the Republic, citizens were conscripted for each campaign season; Italian allies supplied units of about equal size.
Enslaved labour	Used widely in workshops once commerce grew.	The economics of the latifundia "depended upon slavery".

Expansion: two Greek waves and one Roman flood

Greek wave 1: colonisation, about 750 to 500 BCE. Greek city-states founded a couple of hundred settlements on the coasts of southern Italy, Sicily, Gaul (France), Spain, North Africa and the Black Sea. The sources give several reasons:

Pressure at home: population growth on limited land. Herodotus says Thera sent out the settlers who founded Cyrene after overpopulation and a long drought caused unrest.
Trade: many colonies were trading hubs. Byzantium controlled the strait through which Black Sea grain reached the Aegean.
Politics and war: exiles and refugees left too. After the Persians captured Phocaea in 545 BCE, a new wave of settlers fled to Massalia.

Greek wave 2: Alexander the Great, 334 to 323 BCE. Alexander, king of Macedon, invaded the Persian Empire in 334 BCE. By his death in Babylon in 323 BCE his empire reached from the Adriatic Sea to the Indus River. He founded more than twenty cities, the greatest being Alexandria in Egypt (331 BCE). His death opens the Hellenistic period, when Greek became the common language of trade and government from Egypt to Central Asia.

The Roman flood. Rome conquered most of Italy by the early 3rd century BCE. It then fought three Punic Wars against Carthage (264 to 146 BCE). In 146 BCE Rome destroyed both Carthage and the Greek city of Corinth, and made Carthage's homeland its first North African province, called Africa. Egypt followed in 30 BCE. In 27 BCE the Senate gave Octavian the title Augustus, and the Republic became an Empire. Under the emperor Trajan (ruled 98 to 117 CE) the Empire reached its greatest extent, about 5 million square kilometres; its population is traditionally estimated at 55 to 60 million people. The Western Empire ended in 476 CE; the Eastern (Byzantine) Empire lasted until 1453.

Case study: Africa in the Greek and Roman worlds

Africa was not a passive edge of these civilisations. Four African places shaped their expansion:

Naucratis, Egypt. Greeks traded in Egypt on Egypt's terms. Herodotus writes that the pharaoh Amasis (ruled 570 to 526 BCE) "gave to such as liked to settle in Egypt the city of Naucratis for their residence". For much of its early history it was the only permanent Greek settlement in Egypt: the pharaoh decided where Greeks could live and trade.
Cyrene, Libya. A Greek colony on the African coast that grew rich enough to become a centre of philosophy: the Cyrenaic school was founded there in the 4th century BCE.
Alexandria, Egypt. Founded by Alexander in 331 BCE, it became one of the largest cities of the ancient world and a leading centre of science and scholarship for almost a thousand years.
Carthage, Tunisia. A Phoenician colony that became the strongest power in the western Mediterranean. It fought Rome for 118 years (264 to 146 BCE). Its general Hannibal crossed the Alps and invaded Italy in the Second Punic War, which began in 218 BCE.

Rome's victory over Carthage is the turning point of its expansion: after the Battle of Zama in 202 BCE, no rival was left in the western Mediterranean.

Warning

Three slips that cost marks

"Greece" was not a country. Before Macedon and then Rome conquered them, the Greeks lived in hundreds of independent city-states that often fought one another. Write "the Greek city-states", not "the Greek government".
Republic and Empire are two periods, not two names for one thing. Rome conquered Carthage, Greece and much of Spain as a Republic, before it had an emperor.
BCE years count down. From 733 BCE to 146 BCE is 733 − 146 = 587 years. Across the year 0, add: from 27 BCE to 117 CE is 27 + 117 = 144 years (there was no year 0, but A-level answers usually ignore this one-year difference).

Tip

Push and pull. For any "why did they expand?" question, sort causes into push factors (problems at home: shortage of land, drought, war, exile) and pull factors (attractions abroad: trade, farmland, metals, strategic straits). Give one example of each, with a place and a date, and you have the core of a good paragraph.

Important

Discuss. Greek settlers were usually limited to the coasts, did not claim the land behind them and did not demand tribute from the peoples there. Roman provinces, by contrast, were governed and taxed by Rome. In what ways was Greek colonisation like the European colonisation of Africa that you studied in S2, and in what ways was Roman rule closer to it? Prepare two points for each, then decide which ancient system was more like 19th-century colonialism.

CrashCourse, "The Persians & Greeks: Crash Course World History #5". John Green compares the many small, competing Greek city-states with the vast Persian Empire next door. Watch for how geography and the sea explain the difference, and note one effect of the Persian Wars on Athens.

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Practice

Questions 1 and 2 use the map and timeline; 3 to 5 test understanding; 6 is an exam-style essay plan.

Name the colony founded by Megara, and explain why its site was so valuable to Greek cities such as Athens.
How many years passed between the founding of Syracuse and the destruction of Carthage? Show your working.
Give three reasons why Greek city-states founded colonies. Support each with a named colony.
Explain two ways in which the geography of Greece shaped its political life.
Give one similarity and one difference between the occupations of the Greeks and the Romans.
"Carthage, not Rome, decided the history of the Mediterranean between 264 and 146 BCE." Plan an essay: an introduction, three points with evidence, and a conclusion that takes a position.

Show answersHide answers

Byzantium (modern Istanbul). It stood on the strait linking the Black Sea to the Aegean, so it could control the ships carrying Black Sea grain, on which Athens depended.
Both dates are BCE, so subtract: 733 − 146 = 587 years.
Any three, e.g. shortage of land and population pressure (Syracuse, founded by Corinth in 733 BCE, on fertile Sicilian land); drought and unrest at home (Cyrene, founded from Thera); trade (Byzantium on the grain route, or Massalia as the hub of trade in the western Mediterranean); flight from war (refugees from Phocaea to Massalia after 545 BCE).
Mountains separated settlements, so independent city-states grew up instead of one kingdom; scarce farmland pushed cities to found colonies overseas, which spread the polis model across the Mediterranean.
Similarity: both farmed olives, grapes and grain and traded by sea. Difference: Roman farming was increasingly organised in large commercial estates (latifundia) worked by enslaved people and fed by grain from provinces such as Egypt; Greek farming was on small plots of scarce land, and Greek cities relied on imports such as Black Sea grain.
Introduction: define the Punic Wars (264 to 146 BCE) and state a view, e.g. "Carthage shaped the wars, but Rome decided their outcome." Points: (a) Carthage was the leading western power and its control of Sicily drew Rome into the First Punic War; (b) Hannibal's invasion of Italy from 218 BCE forced Rome to build new armies and fleets; (c) Rome's victory at Zama (202 BCE) and destruction of Carthage (146 BCE) made Rome master of the western Mediterranean and created the province of Africa. Conclusion: weigh Carthage's role as the challenge against Rome's role as the winner, and decide.

Quick check

Which reason best explains why the Greeks lived in many independent city-states rather than one kingdom?

Key points

Greek civilisation grew in hundreds of independent city-states on a mountainous, sea-bound land; Rome grew from one city on the Tiber in the centre of the Mediterranean.
Both lived by farming olives, grapes and grain, by sea trade and crafts, and both depended on enslaved labour.
Greeks expanded by founding colonies (c. 750 to 500 BCE) and through Alexander's conquests (334 to 323 BCE); Rome expanded by conquest, above all by defeating Carthage (264 to 146 BCE), and was largest in 117 CE.
African cities, Naucratis, Cyrene, Alexandria and Carthage, shaped this expansion rather than simply receiving it.

Sources and credits

Quotation: Phaedo, Plato, translated by Benjamin Jowett, Project Gutenberg, public domain. Quoted word for word.
Facts and dates checked against Wikipedia contributors: Greek colonisation, Ancient Greece, Economy of ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Roman Empire, Punic Wars, Africa (Roman province), Roman Egypt, Latifundium, Naukratis, Alexander the Great and Alexandria, Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0; adapted by Ganzaa.
Map of Greek colonies: drawn by Ganzaa on coastlines from Natural Earth (public domain).
Photo: Antimenes Painter, olive gathering, London BM 1837-0609-42, ArchaiOptix, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Map: Roman Empire Trajan 117AD, Tataryn, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Video: The Persians & Greeks: Crash Course World History #5, CrashCourse, embedded from YouTube.

Written by Ganzaa: the analysis, the tables, the timeline, the case study and the exercises. This lesson adapts CC BY-SA material and is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.

1The source: a map of a sea, not of a country

2Location: how the land shaped two civilisations

3Occupations: how Greeks and Romans earned a living

4Expansion: two Greek waves and one Roman flood

5Case study: Africa in the Greek and Roman worlds

The source: a map of a sea, not of a country

Location: how the land shaped two civilisations

Occupations: how Greeks and Romans earned a living

Expansion: two Greek waves and one Roman flood

Case study: Africa in the Greek and Roman worlds