- Go stand in the Hagia Sophia and tell me the Romans did little to improve architecture and engineering.

- I won't defend the Roman record on slavery, but I will point out that the Greeks (particularly the Spartans) were slave societies too.

- The Greeks were significantly more xenophobic and sexist than the Romans. If you washed up on the shores of ancient Greece, you could never have become a citizen. The Romans were far more tolerant and inclusive.

- Putting spaces between words was a medieval innovation. The Greeks wrote in much the same way as the Romans, and that was thanks to the Phoenicians!

- Romans revered Greek culture because their city started in a period when Greek colonies were spreading Greek influence throughout the Mediterranean and, specifically, in Italy itself. Greece was to Rome as Rome was to medieval Europeans: A colonizer.

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No ancient society smells of roses if you look close enough. However, it's also rare to find ancient societies that expanded and persisted for centuries without being innovative and progressive. The Romans were both awful and great, much like the Greeks, Akkadians, Babylonians, Sumerians, etc. before them.

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bigstrat2003 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Also, our own society right now will be someday considered barbaric by our descendants. I don't know what for, but you can bet your bottom dollar it will happen. We should show the people of the past some grace, the same way we might hope the people of the future will show us some grace.

	▲	rayiner 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Eating meat. Changes in moral perception generally are downstream of changes in technology. E.g. the modern conception of women being equal participants in the economy arose alongside the growth of the knowledge economy, where your average worker was sit in front of a computer instead of bolting doors to a car frame on an assembly line. I strongly suspect that once lab grown meat becomes ubiquitous, our killing and eating animals will come to become regarded as barbaric.

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Shitty-kitty 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sparta is not exactly known as the pinnacle of civilization. As for the rest of your comment, you make some good points.

	▲	TheCoelacanth 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Sparta is quite possibly the pinnacle of horribleness for civilization, which is why I think they emphasized that it particularly was a slave society (80%+ slaves and a majority of the remainder were non-citizens).