ROMAN CIVILIZATION

The Encyclopaedia Britannica writes:

Towards the close of the pre-Christian period, the Roman Empire achieved dominance over the entire Mediterranean world. Rome presents a paradox to historians of science. This civilization, so sophisticated and apparently modern in its politics and personalities, very strong in the learned disciplines of the law, very progressive in the state technologies of warfare and public hygiene, with direct access to the corpus of Greek science, nevertheless failed to produce a single scientist.

The article goes on to say that historians, attempting to explain the Romans’ utter failure in science, suggest that “perhaps the social structure of Rome, combined with its long adherence to gross forms of magic, left no place for an appreciation of that peculiar commitment to the hard and hazardous road to knowledge and wisdom that lies through disciplined enquiry into isolated aspects of the natural world. Indeed, when one considers how few have been the cultures in which science has flourished, one may reverse the question and consider Rome as the normal, and classical Greece as the surprising phenomenon to be explained.”

The historians have failed to produce any convincing answer to this question. But the answer becomes obvious when we take into account the fact that the Romans were polytheists. It was actually polytheism and idol worship, which stood in the way of their carrying out research and investigation in the field of science. The concept of the sanctity of all-natural objects prevented them from making a conquest of them.