Quote:
Originally Posted by Adam the Ant
Scipio beat Hannibal.
End of thread.
Greek/Spartans will disagree.(see Battle of Marathon, 450 BC)
Charles Martel will also disagree(see Battle of Tours, 732 AD)
As for the main story of the thread -
I always see Britain crucial to this point.
- Coal helped strongly to lead to the industrial revolution
- the reformation allowed the scientific enlightment of scotland and england to go fairly untouched.
One thing that strikes me is always ''why didn't the romans do what europe did 1000 years later''.
One of the main factor is that around the 1700, religion had took it's rightful place(not completely, but was on the way), as a moral force. When Christianity became much less a political factor and more of just a morality issue, it opened the lid to science. I wouldn't blame it all on religion however, as without them it's very likely that slavery would have lasted much longer and education would have taken a lot longer to get installed amongst the lower classes.
The Romans on the hand, stuck to hard polytheism all the way. Things worked that way, because the gods made it that way, and thats it. Obviously there's other factors(romans were technologicly behind to asia almost the entire way, but thats another debate).
Last edited by Adaptation; 03-28-2011 at 02:06 AM.