[comrade1234]

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.

[toyg]

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.

[Shitty-kitty]

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.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Irrigation, sanitation and water-systems were invented in Mesopotamia (as were cities)

This is sort of like saying computers were invented in Mesopotamia because they did math.

Roman water and earth-moving civil engineering was absolutely cutting edge to the degree that the projects they undertook would have been unfathomable to their Bronze-Age predecessors.

[flir]

> Medicine/education, that's the Greeks

Egyptians, Shirley?

(Although they're such abstract concepts, I'm sure everyone had them to some degree).