According to the historian of culture, Christopher Dawson, The age of the Romanization of the Hellenistic East was also the age of the Hellenization of the Roman West, and the two movements converged to form a cosmopolitan civilization, unified by the Roman political and military organization, but based on the Hellenistic tradition of culture and inspired by Greek social ideals.; What evidence is there for Dawson's claim?

In the late 1980s and 1990s, a number of archaeological studies began to examine the mechanics of Romanization in the weste
provinces of the Roman Empire. While the agenda was to provide new ways of looking at processes of cultural and political change which went beyond one-sided models prioritizing Rome and Roman culture, and imposing a bipolar Roman-native dichotomy, the “New Romanization” was open to criticism. Most crucial was the accusation that Romanization, whatever its apparent new theoretical orientation, continued simply to be another way of saying “acculturation” and gave undue emphasis to elite emulation of dominant Roman cultural models. Even with a shift in the parameters of the question, the very continued use of the term Romanization – its semantic extension to refer to processes which didn’t necessarily involve any “Romanization” per se – was also deeply problematic.