(January 11, 2013 at 10:18 pm)jonb Wrote: The Roman Republic and Empire stifled development. It did not advance anything.
I disagree because Greek science continued to develop after the conquest of the Greek world by the Romans. Because the Romans essentially adopted Greek civilization lock stock and barrel, much akind to the Russian adoption of Western European civilization from the 17th century onwards. This scientific advancement continued until the third century CE, when the empire went through fifty years of civil war, followed by an economic depression.
Then after that you had Christianity becoming a legal religion and then the official religion. These early Christians were not interesting in maintaining ancient scientific works and a lot of these works have been lost. However what do have of Classical works on science and philosophy shows that the Classical era Greeks and Romans were making scientific discoveries and aruging philosophical ideas which would not emerge again until the sixteen and seventh centuries.
For instance the Roman Stoic philosophers were arguing that slavery was morally wrong and all men were brothers. Those ideas would not emerge in Western civilization until the 18th century.
The historian Richard Carrier discusses a lot about Greco-Roman science in this various talks.
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