In the Peloponnesian War Athens is found hiring barbarian specialists, light infantry from Thrace. The conception of warfare as a collation of crafts had, it is attractive to suppose, a number of historical consequences. Military excellence as craft could also undermine civic harmony by reducing the dependence of the rich citizen upon his neighbours. By the third century Rome was a full member of the Hellenistic cosmos, trading and treating and fighting with Greece, the Hellenistic kingdoms and the Hellenized maritime power of Carthage. The Roman cult of virtus manifests itself in the degree to which Roman society was adapted to the making of war. For war held a different place in Roman than in Hellenistic culture. If the Romans were like the shark, the Greeks were like the dolphin: both ravening predators, but the one morose and single-minded, the other playful and inquisitive.

Asia Minor and Achaea were nurseries for Christianity, as the New Testament shows. Asia Minor is important for understanding the development and diversification of the Christians religion. Civic rivalry and civil unrest played their parts in the 'webs of power' which bound the rulers and the ruled. Cities might be melting-pots of Greeks and Anatolians, Romans and Jews. Well-established Jewish communities might be strongly ambivalent in response to Hellenistic culture, or actively finding means to accommodate to it. Asia Minor was long established as home to cults of Zeus, the Phrygian Men, mother goddesses, divinised heroes, and monotheism as well. Early Christian traditions about Ephesus and Athens show the interface between Christians, Jews, pagans, city politics and magic. Christians appreciative of the heritage of Judaism remained influential in the churches. Chiliasm and Christian prophetism had particular associations with Asia Minor, though either might be found elsewhere.

For half a millennium the printed book has been the primary means of communicating ideas in the Western world. The history of Roman literature effectively begins with Ennius. Plautus in his comedies had reproduced his Greek models in metres in which the influence of native Latin verse is apparent. Roman educational institutions, predictably, follow Greek models. The casual and fluid nature of publication in the ancient world is described just as characteristic of what happened to books after publication. For educational and rhetorical purposes epitomes and abstracts were increasingly in vogue. Roman scholars took over the traditions of Alexandrian literary scholarship along with the rest of Hellenistic culture. From Virgil onwards Latin poetry was profoundly influenced by rhetoric, and a style of literary criticism that fails to take account of this fact will miss much that is essential to the poetry. Literary Latin was an artificial dialect, quite distinct from the spoken idiom.