Diffusion of Urbanization

Today, we talked about the urbanization of the Greeks and Romans.  The Greeks were highly urbanized by 500 BCE.  They had over 500 cities and towns.  The sities were separated by mountains and were very clumped together.  They had many cities on the islands too.  Each city would have an agora and an acropolis, which is the higheat point of the city.  The Romans liked the way the Greeks did things, so they kind of copied their way of setting up towns(not to mention their gods too.)  The Romans had hundreds of miles of roads and sea routs.  The difference between Greek cities and Roman cities was that in Greece most of the population was comfortable, not overly rich and not dirt poor.  In the Romans case you were either extremely wealthy or dirt poor and you were a slave to the extremely wealthy people.
We also discussed in class western civilization.  Thankyou, Mr. Schick, for that intro to western civ.