>That's because the things that get preserved are the things that are pretty. You think Romans built their outhouses and warehouses and cheap apartments to look

>That's because the things that get preserved are the things that are pretty. You think Romans built their outhouses and warehouses and cheap apartments to look like the colosseum? No, that shit was ugly too, that's why it's not around any more. This is called "survivorship bias". The interior of the small apartments in Pompeii are beautifully decorated, and at the very least more skillfully so than most medieval churches, and we are talking about a small run of the mill rural Italian town. The reason Roman architecture is gone, is that the christians scrapped them for building materials to build churches, something that still happened until relatively recently (see the Temple of Ceasar pillaged in the late 15th century). The Colosseum itself is a pretty bad example of architecture left intact, it's literally sawn-off in half.