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 ficti

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.