it seems like my unwanted style editor removed the phrase that:

the romans were seen as destroyers of civilization.

it was in the paragraph about the greeks & mithridates (a very late hellenized achaemenid from the pontic region that launched the last serious resistance against roman hegemony); i'm not going to edit it back in, but you can do it yourself, mentally.

and, this is true.

you probably know about the temple scattering in jerusalem, but that is ironically the one example that is probably overblown. the jews were not scattered, and in the end they just converted to islam. the descendants of the ancient hebrews exist in the region, still, today. we call them palestinians, ironically after the name of a group of greek colonists called philistines. and, maybe you know that story about the giant indo-europeans, too. the one with the rock; it's very silly, but a fun children's fairy tale.

they burned corinth down, too.

and carthage.

they slaughtered armenians, celts, britons, germans - anybody that gave them the slightest bit of trouble.

that was why the rest of the world ganged up on them, in the end, and destroyed them - they were horrible.

but, what i meant in context was that, at the end of the hellenic period, they brought war back to a culture that had largely vanquished it. it is true that the various alexandrian successor states in the hellenic period had squabbles, and that cities would sometimes change hands, but they didn't fight wars. they considered it uncivilized. after all, they were all hellenes, right? let the barbarians fight their wars. have an olive, my friend. let us debate existence, instead.

yes, the greeks - truly a few strands in the genome ahead than the rest of them. the brits could only offer a weak emulation, as much as the shakespeares and bacons of the world desired otherwise.

so, this idea is all over the greek historical literature, or what survived the muslim rewriting and christian burning of it. the romans admired the greeks for their superior intellect, but the greeks viewed the romans as barbarians.

catholics are still taught that the romans created the world.

but, the greeks would have claimed they destroyed it.