The Oldest Living Civilization (1944)

Like I said, erudites in the 19th century all across Europe would be fluent in ancient Greek. As to read vs understand, that's the difference between alphabet and ideograms. But IIRC modern Greek speakers have an easy time making sense of ancient Greek.

Kings of Europe would claim their legitimacy comes from the Roman empire times. The pope would continue to crown people emperors of Rome, like Charlemagne (emperor of both Germany and France) Napoleon or the Habsburgs. And Roman empire was in the clear cultural continuity of ancient Greece.

We just don't do these claims (outside of some fringe far-right groups), because they are not really relevant to what our countries are today. Ancient Greeks were xenophobic, misogynistic, pedophiles, mostly authoritarian and militaristic. We are nothing like them, but most cultures have very ancient roots.

And I'll tell you why I react strongly with that. We used to have school programs teaching us similar bullshit. Mostly, the national narrative would be that we, French, are Celts, Franks, who were occupied by the Roman empire, which spawned the aristocracy, until we defeated it during the Revolution. That sense of belonging to a 3000 years old continuity served to foster nationalism and make sure that we don't feel too close to our neighbors.

It is an easy sale, you can write a history with that that is mostly correct. You have to ignore some facts, but for 100 years, "history was written that way" or at least, text books were.

China has decided on this nationalistic narrative that they are a very old consistent and coherent nation that has lasted 3000 years. Never mind the CCP coming to power by being pretty much the opposite of what the empire was or that China has been much smaller and much divided than it is today for most of its history [1]. What it says is that they want to use this history as the basis to legitimate their authoritarianism, "because that's how it always were". I am sure they will put far less emphasis on the periods when it was separated in several different kingdoms. Or on the fact that their unity is more of a successful Mongol enterprise than a local Chinese discovery of good government.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=zdHkY3XYHKA

The Roman Empire was an overarching idea whenever it was fractured, but to Kaisers, Czars, Sultans, that one guy from Corsica and whoever else claimed spiritual succession it was just a claim to status without a trace of cultural continuity.

Rome has been a hugely important influence to many cultures and nations, but the identity fanned out into numerous branches to thin to bear identity:

The city itself, well, that's still standing but it's certainly no empire.

The (western) administrative network, in a freak turn of events that you couldn't make up if you tried, lives on in the Catholic church, headed by that one office of republican Rome that kind of still exists. Pontifex Maximus, head priest in charge of making up calendar rules to strike fear upon software developers.

The political entity, it lived on far into the middle ages. But how Roman can you be when you don't talk a word of Latin?

The various populations who did talk Latin: power positions taken over by foreign warlords with little talent for or interest in administrative continuity (which is how the church got to monopolize all clerical applications) and by the time they had assimilated with the locals, cultural identity had long transformed into something new.

The Frankish peregrine kings and their successors who occasionally got an outmaneuvered pope and the acclaim of bribed and/or terrified townspeople to declare them emperor? Not much Roman about them, not even much territorial overlap. The continued existence of the actual Roman Empire somewhere else did help either and those two certainly did not agree that they were one.

The brand that we think of when we hear "Roman Empire" is Cesar, Cicero, their language and their gang of pagan gods. But that's just a snapshot, it ignores centuries of Christian empire, the many centuries of Christian Greek empire. The cultural identity died before the political entity, perhaps this is pay of why the echoes of the cultural identity are so strong.