Not the Empire phase for me. It was a loot economy that needed a constant influx of slaves and stolen treasures. The life expectancy of a slave in a mine or a farm was below 10 years. The apologist "being a city slave can't be so bad" it was 17.

People hype the literacy and written culture but don't realize that it was either the upper class who wrote stuff or it was rich families who funded it. And Roman culture never really reached the zenith or influence that Greek culture did.

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I think the world is general has been slowly shifting away from Neo-Classicalism. And archaeology has kinda destroyed the myth that "it was a darkage after Rome felled" because we can literally tell from skeletons that nutrition improved but some fields like medicine did halt for awhile.