The collection of Greek and Roman art at the Metropolitan Museum—more than seventeen thousand works ranging in date from the Neolithic period to the time of the Roman emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity in A.D. 312—includes the art of many cultures and is among the most comprehensive in North America. The areas represented are Greece and Italy, but not as delimited by modern political frontiers: much of Asia Minor on the periphery of Greece was settled by Greeks; Cyprus became increasingly Hellenized in the course of its long history; and Greek colonies were established around much of the Mediterranean basin and on the shores of the Black Sea. For Roman art, the geographical limits coincide with the political expansion of Rome. The department also exhibits the pre-Greek art of Greece and the pre-Roman art of Italy.
Today, the objects in the department range from small, engraved gemstones to black-figure and red-figure painted vases to over-life-size statues and reflect virtually all of the materials in which ancient artists and craftsmen worked: marble, limestone, terracotta, bronze, gold, silver, and glass, as well as such rarer substances as ivory and bone, iron, lead, amber, and wood.