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What history has taught me is that the Roman Empirewere essentially somehwat crappy copy cats intellectually and technologically, but did quite well at war and so gained a rpeutation for that.
Seriously, the Greeks thought up almost all of their best ideas.

I get realy twitchy when people give the ancient gods their roman names. It irritates me.
The romans had their own religion, but then suffered a series of natural disasters. They collectively went "oh s**t!" and so decided to adopt the Greek ones.

so i end up mentally yelling "It's HEREKLES!" when ppl say Hercules, "APHRODITE!" when people say venus, "HERMES" when people say mercury etc etc.

grrg.


The romans were very very flawed technologically. Partially due to their world view, partially due to the mediterranean environment limiting them (eg the trees weren't good enough to make proper functioning sails so they were stuck with teh crappy square ones and oars). Also smelting was better in places liek Gaul and Britain because the environment and technological mindset was different.

baaah. I'm not going to dredge up my essay on it, but yeah. roman 'greatness' is genrally exaggerated.

Not to say they weren't impressive in battle and conquering, but Socially they were often somewhat retarded. for example one of the main reasons why they had to'expand or die' was because their economy wasn't structured in such a way as it could support itself, so they survived off the spoils of plundering at war and used the new territories as an overflow for the increased population.
ie no explansion = literal collapse.



That said, the greeks were technologically backward too...

and apart from the issue sof value systems limiting their potential, you can't balme eitehr of them.


/nerdrant
lol

i suppos eit is confusing. Hercules is certainly easier to say lol


incidentally after watching the disney hercules (and loving all the little refrences to his 12 trials) the origional story is pretty damn nasty.

eg hera, instead of being his mother, tries to kill him by making him do all these dangerous tasks. But she gets him to do this by having him first go insane and kill his wife and kids (ie Megara is murdered by herc), so he feels so guilty he'll do the trails.
that stuff is DARK.

As a kid I adored egypt and romans, but i think my favourite were the greeks because of all the awesome stories. I had me a little 'horrible histories' book full of greek legends and monsters :3

that's a point, do you get 'horrible histories' over there?
(whereever 'there' may be? lol)

lol


I think catholics still do that. I know my mum did it when she was about that age. I think it's called 'confirmation' or 'communion'.
probably confimation.

haha! That's awesome xd

haha your grandma sounds cool.
Ater all, grandparents are young people who just got old, so in theory they shouldn't change. (heck they should get more pervy over time, not less XD)

ive known that Rome got all it's tech and such from other country's, along with taking the religion from the Greeks but renaming them (never really cared for the Roman pantheon anyways, more on that later) and have you seen its rulers? most of them were ******** batshit insane, hell one of them (Nero, not the DMC one mind you razz ) even supposedly burned down 1/3 of the public sector of Rome to build his own 'pleasure palace', as historians called it (it was a bloody brothel for gods sake, just say it already! scream ) and the mother of, i think, Claudius basically seduced her son's way to the throne, cause she wanted power (even if indirectly) so once Claudius got the throne, she manipulated him to get what she wanted but he ended up doing the worst thing you could do in Rome, he killed his mother... thats all i can really remember from the History Channel show on the Roman empire

also, DT, when it comes to Greek mythology, i think you and i would get along great XD
ever heard of an RTS PC game called Age of Mythology? (it also had an expansion pack called Age of the Titans)
the middle school i went to in Salisbury (for most of 6th grade, then moved up to Pasadena) actually had an Ancient History class! being the Greek myths nerd i am, i took the class (ACED IT XD) and the teacher was one that my dad had had when he was in school O.o

the teacher had a little quiz game that was used to help us review where the class (it was a small class, around 10 kids or so, including myself) were put into groups and each group had a little egg shaped buzzer (it was an actual quiz game toy thing, but i cant remember the name of it D: ) and, well, after awhile, every one wanted me to be in their group cause i was usually the first one to answer and i was right like 99.9% of the time, so one day the teacher asked if i'd be okay with no longer taking part in the review games, cause i already knew alot about ancient Greeks and Egyptians (cause of Age of Mythology :B and i read a lot of books about them too) and instead i would actually come up with questions for the review games, of course i took the offer and i came up with some pretty hard questions so they had to pay attention to the little details too, not just the big picture (figuratively speaking that is) like for instance, the only question i remember making now is what was the color of the crown of the pharaoh of the Upper Nile or something

Don;t forget the guy with the horse Xylert! LOL
(was that copernicus...?)



Tee hee, probably would smile i've heard fo taht game but never really knew what it was.

we more or less scrapped ancient history when i left primary school sad BUT at uni I do touch upon the Romans a LOT. Also I did a course all about the aztecs and other south-american civilisations, which was almost as cool.