I understand your feelings about the Greeks, because I feel it myself. I've had very particular ideas about Greece as Western and the seed of our own culture for a long time (in that I think that's a tautology and not very well thought out because their thinking was so very different from our own, but we are taught this is not true--this is a holdover from our early modern period, I think, in large measure).

Now I am facinated. My education is skewed to Greece and the near east, so I've never really spent much time with Rome in a deep way because I always thought of them as vulgar and rapacious--which I think, on reflection, wasn't even my own opinion but probably something I was reflecting back from my early education. Yay for something new to obsess over!