/lit/ - Literature

>>13571448
The peak of antiquarian civilization was the Roman principate. The Greeks needed backward hillbilly Greeks not of the traditional fold to take them outside of their eternal inter-city warfare peppered with petty tyrannies to conquer Darius, and these hillbillies were conquered in their turn with total ease by Rome. What I imagine the counter might be from the penetrated one with delusions of grandeur who made this is
>b-b-but Rome was a crude civilization! italian barbarians! muh economic disparity muh "uncultured decadence" (as though buttfuckery can be refined)
Apparently circle jerking at the Academy and Demosthenes' speeches justify giving what the Romans termed a nation of merchants, tutors, pedarasts and prostitutes the "peak of civilization" title at a time when they'd barely grasped Sicily and Magna Grecia and their co-ethnics were being oppressed in Asia Minor, a milennium after the Trojan war at which point they were already established in Greece outside Thrace for ages. Surely the title should go rather to an Empire formed not because of historical circumstance but in spite of it almost; An Empire spanning the entire Mediterranean basin and then some, from Britain to the very cradle of civilization in Mesopotamia where the term in its infancy applied not to a bunch of buttfucking faggots and orators covered in olive oil, but to the first cities, and the first lands known to agriculture.