REG: "All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"

To me, what would suck the most is living in a place after the Romans where you can see signs of their civilization but you're living a rural peasant life.

In many ways, that's how a lot of people feel in modern Britain: everywhere you see signs of XIX century grandeur, but "on the streets" life can feel depressingly backwards.

Brewing alcohol was known to hunter-gatherers. Irrigation, sanitation and water-systems were invented in Mesopotamia (as were cities). Medicine/education, that's the Greeks.