While I agree that their counting system was not super useful for a lot of complicated mathematical or theoretical stuff, what you get instead is a lot of architecture, engineering, etc. that has familiar ideas in different terms. What you see if you look into the technology Vitrivius described is that they had a lot of “industrial” things (cranes, siege engines, etc.) but these were all constructed/powered using slaves.
You can also see that the Romans were aware of primitive steam technology. My personal understanding for why they didn’t develop it further was that they had no ideological or financial reason to stop using slaves for all brute mechanical tasks, and since slaves were so disenfranchised, there was no reason to find ways of replacing them.
I’m including this wikipedia article because it’s actually a pretty good summary of the text/writer in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitruvius.
While I agree that their counting system was not super useful for a lot of complicated mathematical or theoretical stuff, what you get instead is a lot of architecture, engineering, etc. that has familiar ideas in different terms. What you see if you look into the technology Vitrivius described is that they had a lot of “industrial” things (cranes, siege engines, etc.) but these were all constructed/powered using slaves.
You can also see that the Romans were aware of primitive steam technology. My personal understanding for why they didn’t develop it further was that they had no ideological or financial reason to stop using slaves for all brute mechanical tasks, and since slaves were so disenfranchised, there was no reason to find ways of replacing them.