The incredible part of this, is how things we take for granted in today's maps, can be traced back to Roman maps.
Like other things from their technology.
Like other things from their technology.
Like what? The Greeks advanced science and mathematics. The Romans sacked Greece and pillaged their artifacts. They didn't advance science or mathematics at all. Rome was a 1,000 year dark age.
Yours seems to be one of those opinions that can be summed up as "lol Greeks good Romans steal" when there is no shortage of technology and civil law improvements the Romans brought to light. To mention a few: a senate, aqueducts, urban planning, sanitation, civil engineering much better than that of the Greeks (see domes and arches), many ideals that are still present in today's governments, farms of quasi-industrial level production, and so forth.
That the Greeks made more developments in Maths is true - it was more of a cultural thing anyway. Your post also completely ignores the fact that Greece flourished under Roman rule and managed to keep many of its freedoms, with the protection of a giant empire. Romans also distributed Greek texts to all corners of the known world, wherein learned people could be found.
Your comment seriously sounds like that of a child, not at all something of the level of HN.
But besides that,
What have the Romans ever done for us?!
A council of elders, in various forms, long preceded the Romans. How would you distinguish "a senate" as a meaningful invention from the boule, gerousia, or similar body in many a Greek polis?
Edited to add: I don't actually think it's unreasonable to take them at their word that the Roman Senate provided some meaningful inspiration for the US Senate, even if it ultimately wound up pretty different. That doesn't make it a good example of Roman innovation, though.
Rome existed for more than a thousand years, and for five hundred of those years there was only an emperor (who didn't refer to himself as a king). I will give you that Rome was good at building but that doesn't stop it from being a dark age. And while Greece was mostly left alone they did not "flourish" and their output significantly decreased. The Romans were anti intellectual and cared more about their traditions than understanding the world. That's why the Romans used Greek statue building techniques to make status of themselves and of the Emperor instead of the gods like Greece did. To Romans they were their own gods. They didn't care about the natural world or about philosophy. They actually became better at statue building than the Greeks (after hundreds of years) which would probably be listed by you as a "Great Roman Achievement" but it's just the result of Aping Greek culture. The Romans themselves were in a sense aware of this; they would use Greek in official documents and would at times dress up in Greek Togas/Chitons. Caesar's Et tu, Brute? was actually spoken in Greek.
Also in this day and age the idealization of the Greeks is something that's largely an old cultural memory, but if you look at the Greeks in their ancient milieu, the "Greek Miracle" was largely an illusion based on lost earlier sources. The Greeks certainly were sophisticated intellectually and they've left a mark on history for it, but they didn't appear in as much of a vacuum as folks thought existed before modern archaeology.
>Afterwards he often made it clear that he was desirous of a second consulship, and once actually announced his candidacy, but when he was passed by and not elected, he made no further efforts to obtain the office, giving his attention to his duties as augur, and training his sons, not only in the nature and ancestral discipline in which he himself had been trained, but also, and with greater ardour, in that of the Greeks. For not only the grammarians and philosophers and rhetoricians, but also the modellers and painters, the overseers of horses and dogs, and the teachers of the art of hunting, by whom the young men were surrounded, were Greeks.[0]
[0] Plutarch Aemilius Paullus https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/...
I find it is in fact the poorly educated who fetishize Rome. If you've never used any Greek math or studied the development of the early European universities then it is easy to see the the surface level buildings and statues of Rome where all roads lead to whereas looking at a maths textbook is all Greek to them. It's hard to accept Rome as being largely stagnant due to most people's unfamiliarity with the ancient world. Instead they compare Rome to the early middle ages in Europe as the barometer of a successful society for some reason.
This is my final statement on these matters, I have no interest in "debate" or conversation with someone who has no idea about what they're discussing and clings to strong value judgments over reason.
As someone who has studied these things for a very long time, perhaps longer than you've been alive, I have tried to help, but it is tedious.
You really have never heard of Pliny or Seneca?
Just to poke a few no-history-required holes in your surety!
I wouldn't be so sure. "Imperātor" is a Latin word meaning "leader" or "commander." "Rex" is the word for "king" which was what the kings of Rome (that is, the emperors) were too ashamed to call themselves. Instead they projected power through endless propaganda while they claimed simply to be "first among the equals" (Princeps).
The influence of Roman roads can still be seen today [1], Roman concrete is still studied by modern material scientists for its properties [2], the Pantheon is still the largest concrete (only) dome in the world [3], and even the width of modern railroads can be traced back to Roman road standards [4]. That's not even mentioning aqueducts, some of which still stand today, that brought unknown levels of sanitary hygiene to cities at the time, or the fact that civil engineering wasn't even the main focus of Roman engineers (who were by and large associated with the military, often enabling the legions to beat impossible odds [5] and displaying a fairly modern understanding of the importance of logistics [6]). Like it or not, Rome was a STEM powerhouse, despite its lack of interest in 'pure' science or mathematics, and owed no small portion of its dominance to the prowess of its engineers.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Aurelius#Writings
[1] https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/roman-roads-wealth-today/
[2] https://news.mit.edu/2023/roman-concrete-durability-lime-cas...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome#Structure
[4] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/railroad-gauge-chariots/
Are you also so cultivated on what the other civilization of the time sacked and pillaged as well?
So you really ought to take look at technological progress in Rome since you've got it absolutely backwards. The Romans were less inclined to sophisticated abstract thought than the Greeks, the sophisticated discourses on political theory especially were dead, and they weren't sophisticated mathematicians, but the Romans were certainly more sophisticated technologically than the Greeks.
Also the Greeks didn't just disappear once the Romans conquered their territory. The great Greek cities like Syracuse, Alexandria, Antioch, et al. carried on under the Romans while the Romans took great pains to preserve and promote Greek learning, while Roman engineering picked up every trick from every culture they encountered. You're surely familiar with the Antikthera mechanism, that was an orrery, a sophisticated Greek astronomical calculating device which the Romans continued to build for centuries.
The Romans had remarkably sophisticated technology which certainly eclipsed the Greeks on many fronts in architecture, aqueducts, et al. The development of concrete was a Roman invention that opened tremendous inventiveness.