ABSTRACT
When Heraclides Ponticus described the Rome captured by the Gauls in 390 BC as a ‘Greek’ city, he probably raised far fewer eyebrows amongst his contemporaries than he does amongst ancient historians and archaeologists today. By the beginning of the fourth century, Rome had been subjected for some three centuries to the influences of Greek culture. Situated between Magna Graecia — the Greek colonial city states of southern Italy and Sicily — and the Etruscan cities to the north, Rome had inevitably received the impulses of both the truly Greek culture of the colonial cities and of the much modified and adapted Greek influences found in the Etruscan cities. The Etruscans exercised the greater and more immediate influence, by reason both of the proximity of the Etruscan heartland and the political domination which they exercised over affairs in Etruria and Latium, even after their kings were driven from Rome at the end of the fifth century BC.
