Question

I know the first civilizations were Babylonians, Sumerians, etc. So when did the Greeks and Romans exist?

Answer 1

168 BC is when the romans existed and 146-86 BC is when the Greeks existed

Answer 2

how?

Answer 3

i mean from what civilization did they come from?

Answer 4

The Archaic period of the 8th-6th centuries BC

Answer 5

Depends what you mean. The Greek and Italo-Roman ethnic groups have been around in the same place probably since the mid to late Paleolithic, when they probably invaded from further east and north and displaced some older tribes of whom we now know nothing, perhaps not dissimilar to those on Crete who founded the Minoan civilization, which flourished from about 2500 BC. Mainland Greece developed a rival civilization, the Mycenaean, which reached an apogee in about 1200 BC after subjugating the Minoans and (according to their own legend) Anatolia, i.e. Troy. Significant numbers of classical Greek legends refer to this period, which the classical Greeks regarded as the dawn of their own history -- not unreasonably, it having taken place 700 years earlier, as far from they as the legends of King Arthur are from us.

Mycenaen civilization in turn collapsed at the end of the Bronze Age, in about 1200 BC, and was followed by some 400 years of "dark ages" of reduced population, abandoned cities, and reduced technological sophistication. At the end of this period (800 BC) we find the rise of the culture that at its apogee, in 400-500 BC, we call classical Greece, when the philosophers flourished (Plato, Socrates), the Athenians fought the Spartans, Xerxes at the head of the Persian Army was stopped.

Further West, the Romans are already distinguishable from the other tribes in Latium. Tradition sets the founding of Rome itself to 753 BC, and suggests it was ruled by an Etruscan king until 500 BC, when Rome rebelled. Both Etruscans and Romans had contact with Greek colonies established on the Italian Peninsula from 700 BC on, e.g. Syracuse, founded in 733 BC, and resident of the famous Archimedes (he of the "Eureka!" cry).

Classical Greece goes into some decline following the exhaustion of the Peloponnesian War (roughly between Athens and Sparta), and is conquered by Alexander the Great, whose brief-lived Macedonian Empire spans Greece, Persia and Egypt in the 300s BC. Rome meanwhile conquers the remainder of the Italian Peninsula, routing the Carthaginians from the southernmost bit after the three Punic Wars, spanning 260-150 BC, and that brings Rome to the forefront of Mediterranean influence. The rest of the Mediterranean, including Greece itself, is brought under Roman suzerainty by 1 AD and the conversion of Rome from Republic to Empire.