Comparison Between Rome And Greece

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The Greeks and Romans both started their own civilizations as city-states. While the irregular coastline and the mountainous terrain of the Greek peninsula isolated the multiple Greek civilizations from one another, the city of Rome was located in the geographical middle of a generally north-south plain bordered on the east with mountains and on the west by the sea. With most their land being open, Rome was exposed to the migrations of trade and invasions of people from the Po River in the north and Sicily in the south. This strategic location provided Rome with the ability to communicate and trade within all the city-states very easily. And with being open to invasion evolved Rome to create a dominating army.
The two primary ethnic and cultural influences upon the Romans were determined to a degree by this geography. The first influence was that of the Etruscans in the north, and the second major influence was that of the Greeks in the south. By the time the city-state of Rome had emerged as a distinct entity out of its Etruscan origins and was prepared to expand its own unique influence, Greek civilization had spread throughout the Mediterranean basin. However, the fierce exclusiveness of the Greek city-states from one another, stemming from their geographical isolation, had determined that Greek colonization of the Mediterranean would be an extension of isolated city-states. The Greek polis did not permit the building of a Greek empire, and the strict barrier to the extension of citizenship prevented any one of the Greek’s city-states from becoming dominant and was hard to unite the isolated cities through the mountains. As we have seen from Greek history, the Athenians were on the way to creating an empire through their domination of the Delian League, but this trend was reversed in the Pelopponesian Wars.
The Romans, on the other hand, brought other communities on the Italian peninsula under their control, first by conquest,...