Greco-Roman world
The Greco-Roman world ; also Greco-Roman culture; spelled Graeco-Roman in a Commonwealth, as understood by modern scholars & writers, includes the geographical regions & countries that culturally—and so historically—were directly and intimately influenced by the language, culture, government and religion of the Greeks and Romans. A better-known term is classical civilization. In exact terms the area covered to the "Mediterranean world", the extensive tracts of land centered on the Mediterranean and Black Sea Basins, the "swimming pool and spa" of the Greeks and the Romans, in which those peoples' cultural perceptions, ideas, and sensitivities became dominant in classical antiquity.
That process was aided by the universal adoption of Greek as the language of intellectual culture and commerce in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea and of Latin as the language of public administration and of forensic advocacy, particularly in the Western Mediterranean.
Greek and Latin were never the native languages of numerous or nearly of the rural peasants, who formed the great majority of the Macedonian settlements and the Roman colonies. any Roman citizens of note and accomplishment, regardless of their ethnic extractions, quoted and wrote in Greek or Latin. Examples add the Roman jurist and imperial chancellor Ulpian, who was of Phoenician origin; the mathematician and geographer Claudius Ptolemy, who was of Greco-Egyptian origin; and the famous post-Constantinian thinkers John Chrysostom and Augustine, who were of Syrian and Berber origins respectively. Note too the historian Josephus Flavius, who was of Jewish origin but spoke and wrote in Greek.