> Roman Empire merely improved roads in many places

/s? This is literally a Monty Python sketch.

Like most Python material that ceased to be funny decades ago thanks to people quoting it endlessly...

The Romans were true imperialists. They considered their opponents to be barbarians, and claimed they lived in wastelands. The truth is more complex. In many places — yes, including Judaea — they inherited infrastructure and buildings. Judaea was previously occupied by the Greeks and a number of other civilisations had left behind remains. The idea that it was terra nullis or a tabula rasa is nonsense. Even Gaul which was considered to be a frontier already had a road system (some of which has been only rediscovered in recent times), and what is now Marseilles was a Greek city going way back before the Roman conquest.

Romanes eunt domum indeed.

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JumpCrisscross 2 days ago | parent [-]

> Romans were true imperialists. They considered their opponents to be barbarians

The Romans also aggressively appropriated from and integrated the people they conquered, extending the concept of citizenship and thus what it meant to be Roman in the process.

Nobody is saying the Romans came across terra nullis. But describing their engineering and culture as "merely improving roads" is silly.

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nephihaha 2 days ago | parent [-]

They stole literature and architecture from the Greeks, chariot building techniques from the Gauls, their identity from the Etruscans and Latins, and probably more than they would ever admit to from the Carthaginians.

When I was growing up we were taught the Romans' own imperial myth that they had built upon nothing. The Monty Python film even promotes that as a joke. There are cities in the Holy Land like Jericho which were inhabited before Rome was even founded.

p.s. Do I get downvotes for pointing out archaeological and historical fact here? When I said "merely improved roads", I was talking about their road network not their entire civilisation.

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JumpCrisscross a day ago | parent [-]

> They stole

They learned and appropriated. People and cultures that think anything foreign is evil don’t tend to advance.

The Romans weren’t some progressive legend. But they integrated and distributed knowledge and technology expertly, and were genuine innovators in their chief technology, that of scaled administration.

> When I was growing up we were taught the Romans' own imperial myth that they had built upon nothing

Why do you think this says anything about the Romans versus the context in which you were educated? Is there a single historical source from Republican, Imperial or Eastern Rome you can point to that claims Rome was built on nothing (other than the founding of Rome)?

They identified as conquerors. You don’t get a triumph for shooing some goats off a hill.

	▲	lawlessone a day ago \| parent [-]
		All empires collapse eventually.