In a recent holiday I took to Malta, I took the liberty of buying a book dealing with the history of the mediterranean and, of course, with the history of whatever nations have held maritime supremacy in that area at one point or another. I read in a chapter relating to ancient maritime powers (EB's time period) and one section deals with the conquest and subsequent destruction of Greece by the Romans. The book is called 'Mediterranean: Portrait of a Sea' By Ernle Bradford (1971). I quote the section:
"After the (Mithradatic) war was over, Sulla's exactations throughout Greece and Asia Minor was such that the ancient 'glory that was Greece' was almost entirely extinguished. Little was left in the land but ruined towns and a war-torn and depressed people. (During the Roman Civil Wars) Greece suffered as not even Sicily had formally suffered (During the 1st Punic War and any other struggle that took place): so much so that, in 45 B.C, a friend of Cicero's would write to the great Roman orator, 'As I was returning from Asia, I looked at the coastlines round about me. The island of Aegina lay astern, and Megara before me. On my right was Piraeus, and on my left was Corinth. These were all once prosperous, highly populated cities - but now they lay before my eyes ruined and devastated...'"
"At no time in her subsequent history Greece recovered from that century (130-30 BC) (...) The cities and temples that appear to be ruined through the inexorable action of time were indeed ruined when the Romans passed through them nineteen hundred years ago. Many of the statues and buildings whose losses we deplore had been broken or looted before the birth of Christ. Columns may have fallen in earthquakes, but many more were overturned by marauding armies"
"(Quoting William Tarn) 'Whole districts were half depopulated. Thebes became a village, Megalopolis a desert, Megara, Aegina, Piraeus heaps of stones; in Laconia and Euboea individuals owned large tracts, perhaps worked by only a few herdsmen; Aetolia, like Epirus, was ruined forever'"
"The Roman Empire was founded upon a desert of bones, and nowhere was this truer than in Greece"
That section has, obviously, stuck with me so now I'm curious. Was the conquest of Greece by Rome truly as devestating as is related in the book? Was Greece damaged and ruined beyond any possible repair, or is this section being sensationalistic about it all? The book was written, after all, in '71, more than 30 years ago, and as the EB team knows well new evidence is regularly popping up and changing what we previously thought about history. Has that been the case here? Or is the author right in saying that Greece was reduced, essentially, to rubble under the Romans?
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