Similarities Between Greece And Rome

Both Greece and Rome are Mediterranean countries, like plenty latitudinally for both to abound wine and olives. However, their terrains were quite unlike. The ancient Greek metropolis-states were separated from each other by hilly countryside and all were well-nigh the water. Rome was inland, on one side of the Tiber River, but the Italic tribes (in the boot-shaped peninsula that is at present Italy) did non have the natural hilly borders to keep them out of Rome.

In Italian republic, around Naples, Mt. Vesuvius produced fertile country by blanketing the soil with tephra which aged into rich soil. There were also ii nearby mount ranges to the north (Alps) and east (Apennine).

Art

Greek art is considered superior to the "merely" imitative or decorative Roman art; indeed much fine art we recall of as Greek is actually a Roman copy of a Greek original. It is often pointed out that the goal of the classical Greek sculptors was to produce an platonic fine art form, whereas the goal of Roman artists was to produce realistic portraits, frequently for decoration. This is an obvious oversimplification.

Not all Roman fine art imitated the Greek forms and not all Greek art looks terribly realistic or impractical. Much Greek art adorned utilitarian objects, just as Roman art adorned the living spaces. Greek art is divided into the Mycenaean, geometric, primitive, and Hellenistic periods, in add-on to its acme in the Classical flow. During the Hellenistic period, there was demand for copies of earlier art, and and then information technology too tin be described every bit imitative.

We typically associate sculptures like the Venus de Milo with Greece, and mosaics and frescoes (wall paintings) with Rome. Of course, the masters of both cultures worked on various mediums beyond these. Greek pottery, for case, was a pop import in Italia.

Economy

The economic system of ancient cultures, including both Greece and Rome, was based on agriculture. Greeks ideally lived on small self-sufficient wheat-producing farms, simply bad agricultural practices fabricated many households incapable of feeding themselves. Big estates took over, producing vino and olive oil, which were besides the master exports of the Romans — not too surprisingly, given their shared geographical conditions and the popularity of these two necessities.

The Romans, who imported their wheat and annexed provinces that could provide them with this earth-shaking staple, also farmed, but they also engaged in trade. (It is idea that the Greeks considered trade degrading.) As Rome developed into an urban center, writers compared the simplicity/boorishness/moral loftier ground of the country's pastoral/farming life, with the politically charged, merchandise-based life of a urban center-middle dweller.

Manufacturing was besides an urban occupation. Both Greece and Rome worked mines. While Greece too had enslaved people, the economy of Rome was dependent on labor of enslaved people from the expansion until the belatedly Empire. Both cultures had coinage. Rome debased its currency to fund the Empire.

Social Class

The social classes of Greece and Rome inverse over time, but the basic divisions of early Athens and Rome consisted of free and freedmen, enslaved people, foreigners, and women. Only some of these groups were counted as citizens.

Greece

Enslaved people
Freedmen
Metics
Citizens
Women

Rome

Enslaved people
Freedmen
Plebeians
Patricians

Role of Women

In Athens, according to the literature of stereotypes, women were valued for abnegation from gossip, for managing the household, and, most of all, for producing legitimate children. The aristocratic woman was secluded in the women'south quarter and had to be accompanied in public places. She could ain, only not sell her property. The Athenian adult female was bailiwick to her male parent, and even after marriage, he could ask for her return.

The Athenian woman was not a citizen. The Roman woman was legally subject to the paterfamilias, whether the ascendant male in her household of birth or the household of her husband. She could own and dispose of holding and go about as she wished. From epigraphy, nosotros read that a Roman woman was valued for piety, modesty, maintenance of harmony, and existence a 1-man woman. The Roman woman could be a Roman denizen.

Fatherhood

Greek House — NYPL Digital Gallery / Wikimedia Eatables

The father of the family was dominant and could decide whether or not to continue a newborn kid. The paterfamilias was the Roman head of the household. Adult sons with families of their own were still subject area to their own father if he was the paterfamilias. In the Greek family, or oikos, household, the state of affairs was more what we consider the nuclear family normal. Sons could legally challenge the competence of their fathers.

Government

Romulus - The First King of Rome — Alan Pappe / Getty Images

Originally, kings ruled Athens; and then an oligarchy (rule by the few), so democracy (voting by the citizens). City-states joined together to grade leagues that came into disharmonize, weakening Greece and leading to its conquest past the Macedonian kings and afterward, the Roman Empire.

Kings likewise originally governed Rome. Then Rome, observing what was happening elsewhere in the earth, eliminated them. It established a mixed Republican course of government, combining elements of democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy, In time, rule by one returned to Rome, but in a new, initially, constitutionally sanctioned form that we know equally Roman emperors. The Roman Empire split apart, and, in the West, eventually reverted to minor kingdoms.