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>a senate, aqueducts, urban planning, sanitation, civil engineering

But besides that,

What have the Romans ever done for us?!

What have they done for us lately?

Pizza.

> a senate

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?

Because Renaissance Humanists told us so! Never mind the fact that the senate never wrote down their laws until a rebellion forced them to! How dare you question that we base our democracy on the Roman Senate (which was not elected)???

It was... sorta elected, in that you generally got in by having previously held any of several offices that were themselves generally elected (not very democratically by modern standards, but somewhat reasonably so compared to contemporary systems) or added to the body by an official (Censor) who was themselves elected.

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.

>many ideals that are still present in today's governments

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.

The funny thing here is that the idealization of the Greeks that you're up to here is directly inherited from the Romans who idealized the Classical and Hellenistic Greeks. But it's worth learning more about what the Greeks and Romans were really up to, since you've got ideas that are not well informed by the source material, and if you took the time to examine the evidence I think you'd be surprised at the sophistication of the Romans.

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.

>not well informed by the source material

>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 would suggest that you try taking a more modern approach to history that focuses more on learning about the subject while trying to see things without biases. Your value judgments about the Romans and the Greeks are where things fall apart for you, and they're unnecessary since there's actually no benefit in making that class of value judgment. If you could free yourself from that kind of thinking, and work as much as possible with evidence based reasoning about the past, I think you'd fare better in this domain.

My opinion is not so uncommon. I actually formed the opinion after reading several books about Rome; until then I had the same view as most here. That Rome was worse than what came before and after is gaining a lot of acceptance. It just isn't said as abruptly.

I did a Classics major and an MA, started on a PhD, and carried on studying since then for a few decades. I was a Hellenist in school, not a Latinist, and I share your admiration of the Greek's intellectual development, but your understanding of Rome is deeply ignorant. I saw younger students who fell for that ignorant view for a while, but they tended to outgrow it. Your view is an especially common one among the poorly educated, it's very immature which is just what makes it appealing, but it really is a foolish take to cling to, and does you more harm than help.

>Poorly educated

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.

I have read Euclid in Greek (and Proclus' commentaries on Euclid) and I'm a big fan of math history in general. My formal studies were tied in part to Greek mathematical history and axiomatization though more related to Plato & Aristotle, earlier stuff than Euclid. The issue here is your value judgments themselves, positive or negative, about Rome of the Greeks are actually stupid. The content of your thoughts outside those could be fine, but it's clearly very shallow, and until there's sufficient content there, your judgments are pointless. Once you reach that point that you have read widely in the Greek and Roman authors and read widely about the domain from scholars who are domain-experts, then you'd recognize that value judgments are not the point, and drop both your fetishization and your bashing, those are both stupid, and you're being stupid loudly here, you should be embarrassed. Rome is what it is, it's worth understanding, but turning it into some kind of historical foil for your bloviations is simply mindless and you should work to grow out of that.

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.

I agree that the way I discussed the issue was wrong. I stand by my initial point that Rome was a dark age. I don't have "no idea" what I'm discussing. I agree that Rome is worth understanding, and I think the early humanist "we are far from the ancients" mindset that still exists today (for some odd reason) has gotten in the way of that. People seem to get lost in Rome's grandiose public works and lose sight of Rome's numerous faults. I think value judgments are warranted being that they are already being made. Wanting to go "back" to the ways Rome as many seem to desire to do (in some form) is clearly a value judgment as well as a severe error. Rome and it's culture simply did not value the natural world or abstract thought. That is perhaps what lead to the aimless conquest which in turn caused an almost global pause in scientific inquiry. Bedsides the issue with the layman understanding of Rome is also the perhaps more concerning academic view of it starting with Burckhardt and his understanding of the renaissance which is based on the Great Rome myth. So I think it is all warranted. Perhaps I should be embarrassed but so should the layman and the academics for constructing this "veil of ignorance" surrounding Rome and its failures.

Is your point entirely based on statues an emperors? None of what you said proves anything and you make baseless claims about them not caring about the natural world or philosophy. Bother to read actual Roman and Greek sources of the time and you will find yourself contradicted soon (Plutarch's Parallel Lives might be of use, then Cicero, etc). Seems clear to me that this opinion is not your own.

It's not based just on statues and emperors, though that shouldn't be ignored. The Roman's never adopted the Greek gymnasium, instead opting to have enslaved Greek philosophers tutor them at home[0] so that they could feel cultured. None of it was real and after a thousand years of LARPing as Greeks the Romans made zero contributions.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_ancient_Rome

> They didn't care about the natural world or about philosophy

You really have never heard of Pliny or Seneca?

How could one man refer to himself as anything for 500 years? Also, they did not refer to themselves as emperor because they did not speak English.

Just to poke a few no-history-required holes in your surety!

>no-history-required

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).

…but what have the Romans done for us?