The Roman empire was an extremely powerful force in the in the western world at during its time, but not because of its own technological and mathematical engineering. Rome was always in Greece’s shadow for much of its advances, philosophically, in the arts, mathematically, and culturally.
Economically, Rome and Greece were very similar. Greek and Roman people were a majority farmers and Greece and Rome had commercial agriculture, which was one of the leading forces in the creation of the empire and trade. However, for all the importance of trade in Greek and Roman societies, merchants enjoyed a somewhat ambiguous status in classical
Mediterranean civilization. Slavery was also a key social institution in classical Mediterranean civilization. The Roman gods were almost exact replicas of the Greek gods, merely renamed and given new roles in some cases, but the basic ideas are almost word for word the Greeks’.
Zues to Jupiter, Hera to Juno, they were still the same gods, just with different names. Not only the Gods though, legends too, like Odysseus became Ulysses, and the story stayed the same. Philosophically, Rome had little to pioneer, if anything at all. The Romans were concerned with the ability of things it gained, if it was able to help the power of Rome increase keep it, and improve it. If not, than the idea or creation was discarded. Roman poetry never really reached the height that Greece’s did, being as it was not useful to Roman expansion, and having their been significantly less Roman poets than Greece poets for this reason. The
Roman numerals, were overly complicated and difficult to use, and compared to the works of the Greek mathematicians, like Aristotle and Euclid, were extremely primitive.
Roman architecture, while not fully borrowed from the Greeks, have one basic idea taken from them, pillars. The basic idea of a pillar was taken from the Greeks, and expanded upon. Roman clothing was borrowed from