[23] Κορίνθιοι δ᾽ ὑπὸ Φιλίππῳ ὄντες ἐκείνῳ τε συνεφιλονείκησαν καὶ ἰδίᾳ πρὸς Ῥωμαίους ὑπεροπτικῶς εἶχον, ὥστε τινὲς καὶ τῶν πρέσβεων παριόντων τὴν οἰκίαν αὐτῶν ἐθάρρησαν καταντλῆσαι βόρβορον. ἀντὶ τούτων μὲν οὖν καὶ ἄλλων ὧν ἐξήμαρτον ἔτισαν δίκας αὐτίκα: πεμφθείσης γὰρ ἀξιολόγου στρατιᾶς, αὐτή τε κατέσκαπτο ὑπὸ Λευκίου Μομμίου καὶ τἆλλα μέχρι Μακεδονίας ὑπὸ Ῥωμαίοις ἐγένετο, ἐν ἄλλοις ἄλλων πεμπομένων στρατηγῶν: τὴν δὲ χώραν ἔσχον Σικυώνιοι τὴν πλείστην τῆς Κορινθίας.
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- Culture Essay
The sack of Corinth, being such a decisive turning point in Greek-Roman affairs, attracted many writers to tell the story of the sack of Corinth as a moral exemplum. The Roman geographer Strabo’s is one such version. After recalling a startling Achaean insult to the Roman ambassadors, the rest of the passage focuses on Mummius’ alleged lack of appreciation of Greek art and the economy of plunder. At the same time, it is important to keep in mind that the Roman removal of works of art from temples and sanctuaries robbed them of their religious significance and treated them as commodities and objects rather than revered images in a sacred context.
Compound verbs and verbs that have irregular principle parts can sometimes be hard to spot. Practice Recognizing hidden words-Pre-reading-SackofCorinthC-E
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Strabo of Amasea was born in the late 60s BCE at a turning point in Anatolian-Roman relations, for it was at just that time that King Mithridates VI died and the kingdom was turned over to Rome by the Roman general Pompey the Great. Amasea served as the home of the royal palace and Strabo’s family had strong political connections with the royal family that went back four generations. After the fall of the Pontic Kingdom, his family moved to Nysa in Caria (southwestern Turkey) where he began his education under the tutelage of Aristodemus, whose father was educated at Alexandria by the scholar Aristarchus (14.1.48). Strabo may have moved to Rome by 44 BCE and witnessed the city after the death of Julius Caesar. His education continued in Rome where he met many of the leading scholars of the day. Bits and pieces of his earliest works—a biography of Alexander the Great, a history of events “after Polybius”—made their way into his Geography. In the mid-20s BCE, he served under Aelius Strabo, the second prefect of Egypt and probably his Roman patron. The last datable references in the Geography occur early in the reign of Tiberius and Strabo probably died in the 20s CE.
Strabo’s travels took him across Asia Minor, Italy, parts of Greece, Judaea, and Egypt, so it is no surprise that he turned to geography as a way to collect and organize the topographic knowledge, history, cultic practices, and ethnographies he had acquired in his education and travels. The first two books introduce the history of geography, the geological formation of the earth’s topography, and the methods of measuring distances. Books 3-17 then take the reader on a tour from Iberia in the west to India in the east and then back to Egypt, ending finally in Cyrene in north Africa, the birthplace of the first major geographer, Eratosthenes. Throughout the work, Strabo undergirds his Geography with the evidence of the Homeric poems, citing Homer more than seven hundred times. Given the profound transformation of Roman society and worldview that took place during the principate of Augustus, it is no surprise that an author like Strabo attempted to organize and synthesize knowledge of the inhabited world in his Geography.
Roller, Duane, trans. The Geography of Strabo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.