I think you're missing my point. I'm not making a moral argument at all but a factual one. The Romans sacked Greece and killed Archimedes. All you have to do is look at the rate of mathematical and technological progress before and after Rome to see that Rome was a dark age. Before Rome we have the Pythagorean theorem, Euclid's Elements, Aristotle and many others. After Rome you have Kitab al-Jabr and later European Universities which were founded on Greek knowledge which had until then been discarded by the Romans.
>The Romans sacked Greece and killed Archimedes. All you have to do is look at the rate of mathematical and technological progress before and after Rome to see that Rome was a dark age.
So you really ought to take look at technological progress in Rome since you've got it absolutely backwards. The Romans were less inclined to sophisticated abstract thought than the Greeks, the sophisticated discourses on political theory especially were dead, and they weren't sophisticated mathematicians, but the Romans were certainly more sophisticated technologically than the Greeks.
Also the Greeks didn't just disappear once the Romans conquered their territory. The great Greek cities like Syracuse, Alexandria, Antioch, et al. carried on under the Romans while the Romans took great pains to preserve and promote Greek learning, while Roman engineering picked up every trick from every culture they encountered. You're surely familiar with the Antikthera mechanism, that was an orrery, a sophisticated Greek astronomical calculating device which the Romans continued to build for centuries.
The Romans had remarkably sophisticated technology which certainly eclipsed the Greeks on many fronts in architecture, aqueducts, et al. The development of concrete was a Roman invention that opened tremendous inventiveness.
The Romans were interested in other things. Their civil engineering, construction methods (e.g. concrete), public infrastructure, military technology, legal sophistication, etc. etc. etc. greatly surpassed that of the Greeks.
Even conceding the lack of contributions to theory, their practical achievements in engineering and government (which insured centuries of cumulative, if not continuous, peace across a region that spanned three continents) combined with their linguistic and literary legacy from Caesar to Virgil (which spawned the Romance languages and influenced much of western literature) are enough to make equating the Roman period with a dark age hyperbolic at best.
