To: tejek who wrote (385995 ) 5/23/2008 9:23:29 PM From: Brumar89 Respond to The Hellenistic period talked about there is the period of the Hellenistic kingdoms between Alexander and the Roman conquest of the eastern Med. The end of those kingdoms didn't change the language and culture of the people in the region. Here:Greek has been spoken on the Greek peninsula (i.e. the southern Balkan region) for over 3,500 years and in western Asia Minor for a little less. The classical period of Greek civilization covers a time span from the early fifth century BCE to the death of Alexander the Great, in 323 BCE. As early as the 5th century BCE, Isocrates, after speaking of common origin and religion, says: "the name Hellenes suggests no longer a race but a culture and education,... the title Hellenes is applied best to those who share our culture rather than to those who share our common blood".[33] Following Alexander the Great's conquests, Greek became the lingua franca of the Eastern Mediterranean and was widely spoken by educated non-Greeks. spread Greek culture from the Adriatic to the Indian Ocean they were laying the foundations for a new era. The beginning of the Hellenistic age is usually placed at Alexander's death. This Hellenistic age, so called because it witnessed the partial hellenization of many non-Greek cultures and a combination of Greek, Middle Eastern and Indian elements, lasted until the conquest of Egypt by Rome in 30 BCE. The Eastern Roman Empire (which was later misnamed by Western historians as the Byzantine Empire, a name that would have meant nothing to Greek speakers of the era[44]) was dominated by Greek culture to such an extent that Emperor Heraclius (575 CE - 641 CE) finally decided to make Greek the Roman Empire's official language. [45] From then on, the Roman and Greek cultures were virtually fused in the East into a single Greco-Roman world. By that time, the Latin West had began referring to the Eastern Roman Empire as Empire of the Greeks (Imperium Graecorum) .[46] Greek speakers at the time however referred to themselves as Rhomaioi (Romans) and were conscious and proud of their Roman Imperial and Christian religious heritages.[44]The Roman Greeks contributed to Western Civilization by their preservation of the literature of the Classical era: Byzantine grammarians were those principally responsible for carrying, in person and in writing, ancient Greek grammatical and literary studies to early Renaissance Italy to which the influx of Greek scholars gave a major boost. [49] Roman Greeks never stopped teaching Homer and the Classics and cultivated the philosophical schools of Platonism and Aristotelism for over two millennia, until the Fall of Constantinople in the 15th century. [50]en.wikipedia.org
