girl it was 2000 years ago??? Unlike the Nazis, they didn't commit a genocide?? And they gave citizenship to people they conquered... I'd say for the standards of the time, they did pretty damn well. It's crazy to compare them to modern standards. And anyways, I'd still rather live under the Romans than the Nazis...

Despite the similarity of name, the "Roman Empire" and the "Holy Roman Empire" are politically unrelated states. One was named after the other, but it was not a successor state.

Context matters. The world has changed quite a lot in 2500 years. We can put higher ethical standards on leaders of modern countries than were made in the distant past.

Is this an AI slop comment?

what about the joys of the United States underground, or the joys of the British Empire underground, or the joys of the Mongol Empire underground?

You're right that the Roman empire was every bit as ruthless as any nation which followed, and very plausibly much more so. But people treat the past as a fictional place when it goes much beyond the memories of people who are alive; and the more powerful and impressive a civilisation was, the more people are interested in it.

It's very hard to find any one really taking the past literally, as events which happened and could easily happen again. One imagines it's a symptom of how we're born and die: before our birth feels unreal to us unless we have some contact in our lifetimes with people who were alive before it.

This effect becomes more concerning when people try to take advise from glorified people of the past: every roman emporer was a genocidal tyrant, none should be immitated. But here we are.

Wellll, there is Berlin Unterwelten. They don't glorify the Nazi past by any means, but they do allow you to visit bunkers from WW2 and the cold war.

This kind of moral absolutism heavily breaks down the ability to form a reasoned historical analysis, or give consideration to context. By the standards of its time, the classical period Roman state often showed a remarkable degree of humane consideration to its subjects. If it was also often despotic and cruel, this stands out partly because the more sophisticated elements of that society made it so. Your average nation during classical antiquity on the other hand, could be much worse.

For example, by any modern ethical standards, an emperor like Marcus Aurelius, or his mentor Antoninus Pious would be considered slaving, war-making monsters, but in the context of Rome and most rulers of Rome's time, they were remarkable paragons of forbearance and ethical nuance, and given the context of their upbringing, this makes them remarkable leaders, not just something so simplistic as cruel war mongers.

By the implicit logic you use, we should disregard the vast majority of major figures, systems and philosophies that have ever existed because they lacked the magical foresight of first having also developed our exact modern ethics (which in any case are often broken today by many respected leaders).

Also, please, there's no comparing the truly deliberate monstrosity of the Nazis to the practices of the Romans. Rome never developed intentional industrial extermination of human lives as a deliberate state policy. The Nazis did, and worse still, did so despite millennia of philosophical moral development being available to guide them otherwise.