What have the Romans ever done for us? Uh, aquaducts?

sanitation?

:shrug:

Have you been drinking again?

nt

DUH!

Pax Americanus, you better believe it.

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?

n/t

and gladiator combat shows at the Colloseum.

good or bad, i dunno :shrug:

:hippie: The Incorrigible Democrat

through time, with each sucessive generation benefitting from the efforts of the previous generation to create a progressively better world is patently wrong.

It took Western civilization 600 years to reverse the decline of being guided solely by faith, and reclaim the right to intellectual pursuit based on evidence, proof, logic, and open inquiry.

Some nifty engineering and architecture, the aquaducts weren't anything to sneeze at, and the roads lasted a long, long time.

They propagated Greek knowledge far and wide, but didn't contribute much before Constantine. Made Spain not Basque or Ligurian, and France not Celtic. Managed to pull Italy together ... something not done again for a long time. Gave W. Europe a fairly standard language for communication and trade for over a thousand years, and helped entrench Greek all through the E. Mediterranean.

Founded lots of cities in England and held off the Picts for a while.

If you count the eastern empire, they managed to keep what knowledge the Greeks had alive for transmission. Most of the knowledge was lost in the West; and for all the wonderful claims of Arabs having transmitted the manuscripts, they got them from the Romans.

We got our alphabet from them. And this really neat and sometimes archaic language.