Greek Culture in the Roman World

Christians under the Roman Empire continued to take up the culturally significant category of classical Greek tragedy and to utilize it to their own rhetorical ends.

The classification ‘resistance literature’ has recently gained ground as a description of the Sibylline Oracles, a collection of Greek hexameters intriguingly blending world history, eschatological prophecy directed to various nations and ethical advice, ascribed to the pagan prophetess Sibyl but in fact composed, expanded and updated by Jews and then Christians from c.2^nd century BCE onwards.

In a recent work on genre in Cicero’s De consulatu suo, Katharina Volk points out the important fact that the hero of this epic was also an intellectual. The uniqueness of Cicero’s position in the poem is reflected in the uniqueness of the poem itself, as it offers us an insight into Cicero’s early intellectual interests. The idea of an early period of Cicero’s philosophical writing in the late 60s in which he and his brother figure as embodiments of the Platonic ideal of the philosopher-ruler has been proposed by Plezia.

It is undeniably difficult to assess the state of Greek philosophy in Rome during the years following her conquest of Greece. Our knowledge is limited, in part, by the state of the evidence, which is predominantly fragmentary, as well as by the domestic turmoil at Rome during this period, when the emulation of Greek culture and language appeared particularly polemic.