Oh how wonderfully cruel and decadent they where!

One of the most civilized of ancient peoples....except when the psycho emperors took control.

Rome's legacy is Western Civilization. Christianity is Roman. In the Koran, for instance, when the author speaks of the Romans, he means the Christians. In the Moslem East, your nationality is your religion. The Roman Empire in the East was the bulwark of Christianity there. The Latin language's descendants is spoken by more people today than probably any other when you consider the five main Romance Languages. Even English is probably majority Romance in origin but is not considered a Romance language. Most countries of the World now follow the Roman Law that either is called that or has come down through the Code Napoleon. Look at the architecture, political institutions, and many others. Without Rome, where would our civilization be today?

I take Gladiator with Russell Crowe to be a pretty accurate portayal of what life in ancient Rome was like;you can also rate Nazi Germany to be a great civilization because Hitler built great highways.

Merciless, thieving, acquisitive bastards whose greatest talent was in adaptation. In so doing they preserved much of their predecessors and conquests to the greater historical good. Great organizers, whose laws, customs and infrastructure have lasted, in some cases, to the present day in some form.

Roman civilization has, for better or worse, provided so much of the foundation for today's Western civilization that the world would be unrecognizable had things developed differently 25 centuries or so ago. Law, language, governmental organization and practices all have been influenced to some extent or other by what happened in the Roman Empire. The Romans were great civilizers (I know that there are plenty of people who would argue about the merits, or demerits, of how the Romans went about civilizing those who they conquered). They had a great military machine that expanded the boundaries of the empire. I once had a college professor who said that the Greeks were thinkers, but the Romans were doers, and do they did, especially when it came to building. They were absolutely magnificent engineers - they built a far-flung road system I'm told that RAF student pilots are told that if they get lost, they should look for the old Roman Fosse Way, one of the straightest roads in England, to get their bearings), built acqueducts that were engineering marvels (some of which are still in use today), and were able to build bridges that modern engineers still aren't sure how to duplicate (i.e., the wooden bridging across the Rhine). To be sure, there was the dark side to the Romans (witness some of the depraved individuals who ruled from time to time), and they got too fond of the good life, which eventually led to the decline and fall of the empire. However, overall, they put a lasting imprint on the Western world.