REG: "All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"
To me, what would suck the most is living in a place after the Romans where you can see signs of their civilization but you're living a rural peasant life.
In many ways, that's how a lot of people feel in modern Britain: everywhere you see signs of XIX century grandeur, but "on the streets" life can feel depressingly backwards.
Brewing alcohol was known to hunter-gatherers.
Irrigation, sanitation and water-systems were invented in Mesopotamia (as were cities).
Medicine/education, that's the Greeks.
> Irrigation, sanitation and water-systems were invented in Mesopotamia (as were cities)
This is sort of like saying computers were invented in Mesopotamia because they did math.
Roman water and earth-moving civil engineering was absolutely cutting edge to the degree that the projects they undertook would have been unfathomable to their Bronze-Age predecessors.
To me, what would suck the most is living in a place after the Romans where you can see signs of their civilization but you're living a rural peasant life.