There is two part in my post :
-How did the Greeks become Romans?
-How did the Greeks keep on being Romans for so long?
I am mostly interested with the first question, but it would be great if both could be answered !
How did the Greeks become Romans ?
My question is not about conquest and political dominance, but about cultural identity.
I know fairly well how the Roman conquest of the various Greeks speaking Empires, City States and other Kingdoms went down, and how the Roman Empire developed structurally and politically in Greek speaking lands.
However, I realized recently that I know pretty much nothing of the processus of transition from an Hellenistic identity to a Roman one Greek speaking people went through.
I am always suprised when I see that Greeks speaking people accepted the Roman identity so well that, after a few centuries, being Roman was their main if not only cultural identity.
Other groups in the Roman Empire were always troublesome, either refusing the Roman identity or Roman political dominance or both.
However, the Greeks, who were both a military and cultural superpower before the Roman, if not the single cultural superpower of the Mediterranean before Rome, and even after Rome rose to proeminence (everyone knows how much the Roman elite saw the Greeks as a superior culture for a while, even after having conquered thems) finally switched to the Roman identity.
How could a group of people who were so much used to do the conquering and asserting their cultural dominance everywhere they went, accept a 'foreign' identity so well ? Was there a lot of resistance against this cultural identity at the beginning ? At what time can we say with certainty that the Greeks really began to see themselves as Romans ? How long did the 'Greek-but-not-Roman' identity linger after Roman conquest ? Did the two identities 'Greek-and-Roman' and 'Greek-but-not-Roman' existed side-by-side at one point ? If yes, was there any friction between the two ?
How did the Greeks keep on being Romans for so long?
Several centuries after the Roman conquest, it seems that being "Greek" mostly meant that you were also Roman. This was accentuated after the fall of the Western part of the Roman Empire, when the Latin people of the West progressively stopped being regarded as Roman by the Greek speaking people of the Eastern part, to the point that, (at least from what I understood, correct me if I am wrong) shortly before the fall of Constantinople a millenium later, it seems that (still from the Greek point of view) to be Roman you kinda had to be Greek. For the next centuries after the fall of Constantinople and in the Ottoman Empire, Greek speaking people would be refered as Romans, and up to the beginning of the 20th century, even after the independance of Greece, a large part of the Greeks would still refer to themselves as Romans.
So my point is that Greek speaking people seem to have accepted the Roman Identity so well that they wouldn't refer to themselves as anything else but Roman for nearly two millenias, while every single other "ethnies" or group of people bound by a common languages who existed in the Roman Empire (and there was a lot of them) and who considered themselves Roman at one point eventually stopped, even the one who were speaking only Latin.
For instance, after the conquest of Roman Gaul by the Franks, the Roman identity lingered for a while: there is a clear distinction between the conqueror, the Franks, and the conquered, the Romans, that lasted several centuries. But eventually the Roman identity disappeared. Same things happened when Roman North Africa was conquered by Arabs: the Roman identity linger for a while before disappearing, leaving only Arabs and other cultural identities present before the Roman : Berbers, Copts etc.
But Greek speaking people never let go of their Roman identity, even after several centuries of submission to their Ottoman overlord.
How could this cultural identity, being Roman, stick without problems for nearly two thousands years for Greek speaking people, even after the conquest by the Ottoman Empire, while the Roman identity eventually disappeared in other conquered ancient Roman land ?
Thanks !
the Roman Empire developed structurally and politically in Greek speaking lands.
That's not really the case. Early Romans were in close contact with "Ethnically Greek" people, sure, but Romans and Greeks were very distinct peoples. The Epicenter of Greek culture was in, well, Greece, and while much of southern Italy was Greek-speaking (especially in the cities) Rome was several hundred miles to the north, and culturally Latin. Pre-Republican Roman culture (the Roman Kingdom) has much more in common with central Italian Etruscan culture than Greek culture.
However, the Greeks, who were both a military and cultural superpower before the Roman, if not the single cultural superpower of the Mediterranean before Rome, and even after Rome rose to proeminence (everyone knows how much the Roman elite saw the Greeks as a superior culture for a while, even after having conquered thems) finally switched to the Roman identity.
The Greeks were a cultural superpower of sorts, but were very politically fragmented. The only Greek empire, constructed by Alexander the Great, collapsed immediately after its architect's death and the Romans were able to pick off the Greek states one at a time with relative ease.
Now, the Romans were enormous Grecophiles, that much is sure. All well-educated Romans would be tutored in Greek classics and be expected to be fluent in Greek. Consequentially, the eastern parts of the empire remained fundamentally Greek speaking throughout the Republican and Imperial eras, and there was no widespread Latinization like in the western parts of the Empire (where, as the emergence of local Vulgates testifies, Latinization was less than complete).
shortly before the fall of Constantinople a millenium later, it seems that (still from the Greek point of view) to be Roman you kinda had to be Greek.
That's not entirely the case. After the solidification of what I'll call the "Latin States," an individual didn't have to be Greek to identify as Roman, however the only people calling themselves Romans were Greeks. Although the Western Portions of the Roman empire broke up into different states, the Eastern (Greek-Speaking) Empire could and did maintain "Roman Continuity." The line of emperors in Constantinople, after all, is unbroken all the way back to the Roman Emperors. Consequentially, Greek name for what the west called Byzantine Empire was "Basileia Rhomaion" which literally means, "Roman Empire."
However, Roman identity wasn't necessarily tied to ethnicity. Roman citizenship was tied to enfranchisement within the Republic/Empire. Thus, since the Greeks were, quite literally, the last citizens of the empire, they continued calling themselves Romans. But over the centuries the Greek word "Rhomaioi" (Roman) came to mean belonging to a distinct Greco-Byzantine national identity, rather than being a member of what remained of the Roman Empire. Although the Byzantine Emperors maintained they were the only successors to the ancient Roman Empire, a distinct Byzantine cultural identity took shape nonetheless, even if it was called "Rhomaioi."
You have posed a lot of different questions here so I thought I would address just one point and that I would not use the Greek people as a model of Romanisation, there are areas of the Empire that experienced much more radical cultural shifts. I would argue that 2nd century AD Gaul is more Roman than Greece is, much of the Hellenised east was more resistant to Romanisation. So while Latin became the lingua Franca in much of the western Empire (so much so that in the 4th century young elites are being educated in Latin by men of Gallic origin) the majority of the east still spoke Greek. I think it can be said that the Greeks actually managed to stay more culturally distinct than many other places in the Empire, you get a considerable amount of what is essentially tourism from Roman elites to Greek Poleis who come to experience and admire the cities.