According to the German historian Theodor Mommsen, the Greeks and the Romans both had cultural and linguistic roots in what is now eastern Europe. He did extensive studies on their languages and concluded that they were both offshoots of a common branch of Indo-European.
Greek civilization began much earlier than Roman. The Greeks had two periods of cultural flourishing, the first from about 1500 to 1100 B.C. This was when the Trojan war is believed to have taken place, and the culture is described in the Iliad and Odessey of Homer. There were two writing systems associated with this culture, Linear A and Linear B, both of which died out when the bronze age civilizations in the region collapsed, around 1100 B.C.
Greek Culture experienced a revival around 800 B.C. This was when they started the Olympic games and Homer’s epics were written down. They had borrowed and modified the alphabet from the Phoenicians with whom they traded. Classical Greek culture reached its zenith in the fifth century B.C.
The city of Rome was founded in the around 700 B.C. Its culture was influenced by the Etruscans to the north of them who had had a thriving civilization for centuries, and by Greeks who had extensively colonized southern Italy, which was known as Magna Graecia. Rome ultimately borrowed much of its religion, architecture, literature and other aspects of its culture from Greece.
The Romans were a heavily militarized culture, as were the Etruscans, the Greeks and the various tribes of Italy like the Samnites and the Oscans. What enabled Rome to become the political and economic powerhouse that it eventually did was its practice of including to some degree the people that it conquered. The Greek city states never united or formed a unified whole. The twelve major cities of Etruria didn’t either. Both Etruria and Greece were eventually absorbed by the ever-expanding Roman empire.
While Rome was happy to borrow many of its cultural and religious practices from Greece, they remained two distinct cultures even after Greece was conquered by Rome.
As the Roman poet Horace put it “Captive Greece took her barbaric captor captive and brought the arts to rustic Latium.”
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