‘The Glory of Your Ancestors’: Identity-formation in Early Roman Athens and Corinth

Abstract

In the first century BCE, the city states of Greece were involved in Rome’s foreign and civil wars. These wars brought about a crisis for these communities which culminated in the incorporation of Greece into the Roman Empire. In both Athens and Corinth, there was an obvious discontinuity with the past through this period of crisis, followed by a process of ‘picking up the pieces’. How did both cities deal with their new Roman status? How did they re-imagine what it meant to be Athenian or Corinthian in this bigger cultural world? This thesis analyzes the way in which both cities expressed a collective identity in the archaeological landscape and material culture. As such, it aims to improve our understanding of how the global and local interrelated and how cultural heterogeneity was realized in a world that became in many ways increasingly homogeneous.