Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Romans were true imperialists. They considered their opponents to be barbarians The Romans also aggressively appropriated from and integrated the people they conquered, extending the concept of citizenship and thus what it meant to be Roman in the process. Nobody is saying the Romans came across terra nullis . But describing their engineering and culture as "merely improving roads" is silly.
They stole literature and architecture from the Greeks, chariot building techniques from the Gauls, their identity from the Etruscans and Latins, and probably more than they would ever admit to from the Carthaginians. When I was growing up we were taught the Romans' own imperial myth that they had built upon nothing. The Monty Python film even promotes that as a joke. There are cities in the Holy Land like Jericho wh…
They learned and appropriated. People and cultures that think anything foreign is evil don’t tend to advance.
The Romans weren’t some progressive legend. But they integrated and distributed knowledge and technology expertly, and were genuine innovators in their chief technology, that of scaled administration.
> When I was growing up we were taught the Romans' own imperial myth that they had built upon nothing
Why do you think this says anything about the Romans versus the context in which you were educated? Is there a single historical source from Republican, Imperial or Eastern Rome you can point to that claims Rome was built on nothing (other than the founding of Rome)?
They identified as conquerors. You don’t get a triumph for shooing some goats off a hill.