The Romans first set military foot on Greek soil in 229 BCE; only sixty or so years later it was all over, and shortly thereafter Greece became one of the first provinces of the emerging Roman Empire. It was an incredible journey - a swift, brutal, and determined conquest of the land to whose art, philosophy, and culture the Romans owed so much. Rome found the eastern Mediterranean divided, in an unstable balance of power, between three great kingdoms - the three Hellenistic kingdoms that had survived and flourished after the wars of Alexander the Great's Successors: Macedon, Egypt, and Syria. Internal troubles took Egypt more or less out of the picture, but the other two were reduced by Rome. Having established itself, by its defeat of Carthage, as the sole superpower in the western Mediterranean, Rome then systematically went about doing the same in the east, until the entire Mediterranean was under her control. Apart from the thrilling military action, the story of the Roman conquest of Greece is central to the story of Rome itself and the empire it created. As Robin Waterfield shows, the Romans developed a highly sophisticated method of dominance by remote control over the Greeks of the eastern Mediterranean - the cheap option of using authority and diplomacy to keep order rather than standing armies. And it is a story that raises a number of fascinating questions about Rome, her empire, and her civilization. For instance, to what extent was the Roman conquest a planned and deliberate policy? What was it about Roman culture that gave it such a will for conquest? And what was the effect on Roman intellectual and artistic culture, on their very identity, of their entanglement with an older Greek civilization, which the Romans themselves recognized as supreme?

公元前229年，罗马人首次踏上希腊的土地；仅仅60年左右，一切都结束了，此后不久，希腊成为新兴罗马帝国的首批省份之一。这是一次令人难以置信的旅程--对这片土地的迅速、残酷和坚决的征服，罗马人在艺术、哲学和文化方面对其功不可没。罗马发现地中海东部在不稳定的权力平衡中被三个伟大的王国分割开来--这三个希腊化的王国在亚历山大大帝的继任者的战争后幸存下来并繁荣起来。马其顿、埃及和叙利亚。内部的麻烦使埃及或多或少地退出了舞台，但其他两个国家却被罗马削弱了。在击败迦太基后，罗马确立了自己在地中海西部的唯一超级大国地位，然后有计划地在东部做同样的事情，直到整个地中海都在她的控制之下。除了惊心动魄的军事行动之外，罗马征服希腊的故事对于罗马本身和它所创建的帝国的故事也很重要。正如罗宾-沃特菲尔德所展示的那样，罗马人通过远程控制地中海东部的希腊人，开发了一种高度复杂的统治方法--使用权威和外交手段来维持秩序，而不是使用常备军，这种方法很便宜。而且，这个故事提出了许多关于罗马、她的帝国和她的文明的迷人问题。例如，罗马的征服在多大程度上是一项有计划、有目的的政策？是什么让罗马文化具有如此强烈的征服欲望？他们与古老的希腊文明的纠缠对罗马的知识和艺术文化以及他们的身份产生了什么影响，而罗马人自己也承认希腊文明是最高的？