Ancient Greece & Rome

Greece and Rome supplied an enormous amount of the modern West's furniture: its alphabet, its legal vocabulary, its architectural grammar and a good deal of its politics. This category covers the city-states and the empire, the wars and the writers, and the engineering that still stands. It treats the two as connected, since Rome absorbed and transmitted much of Greek culture rather than replacing it. The explanations point out where a classical idea or word survives in current use, which is more often than most people expect.