In 146 BC, Roman soldiers burned Corinth, one of the most admired cities in the Greek world, to the ground on the Senate's orders, a calculated act of destruction meant to end Greek defiance for good. Rome Conquers Greece tells the roughly fifty-year story of how the Roman Republic, almost accidentally at first, dismantled the great Hellenistic kingdoms that Alexander the Great's generals had built and absorbed the Greek world into its own system of power. It follows Rome's uneasy first war against Macedon during its struggle with Hannibal, the dramatic proclamation of Greek freedom by the Roman general Flamininus at the Isthmian Games, the crushing of the Seleucid king Antiochus III at Magnesia, and the final destruction of Macedonian independence at the Battle of Pydna, where a Roman general shattered the phalanx that had once conquered the known world under Alexander. It ends with Corinth's fall and Greece's absorption into the Roman province of Achaea. This is also a story about a conqueror quietly conquered in return, since Greek art, philosophy, and teachers flooded into Rome and remade the culture of the very people who had crushed Greek independence. Told partly through the eyes of the Greek historian Polybius, taken hostage to Rome and left to explain his people's defeat, this is a story about how political domination and cultural admiration can exist in the same empire at the very same time.
In 146 BC, Roman soldiers burned Corinth, one of the most admired cities in the Greek world, to the ground on the Senate's orders, a calculated act of destruction meant to end Greek defiance for good. Rome Conquers Greece tells the roughly fifty-year story of how the Roman Republic, almost accide...