Also in this day and age the idealization of the Greeks is something that's largely an old cultural memory, but if you look at the Greeks in their ancient milieu, the "Greek Miracle" was largely an illusion based on lost earlier sources. The Greeks certainly were sophisticated intellectually and they've left a mark on history for it, but they didn't appear in as much of a vacuum as folks thought existed before modern archaeology.
>Afterwards he often made it clear that he was desirous of a second consulship, and once actually announced his candidacy, but when he was passed by and not elected, he made no further efforts to obtain the office, giving his attention to his duties as augur, and training his sons, not only in the nature and ancestral discipline in which he himself had been trained, but also, and with greater ardour, in that of the Greeks. For not only the grammarians and philosophers and rhetoricians, but also the modellers and painters, the overseers of horses and dogs, and the teachers of the art of hunting, by whom the young men were surrounded, were Greeks.[0]
[0] Plutarch Aemilius Paullus https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/...
I find it is in fact the poorly educated who fetishize Rome. If you've never used any Greek math or studied the development of the early European universities then it is easy to see the the surface level buildings and statues of Rome where all roads lead to whereas looking at a maths textbook is all Greek to them. It's hard to accept Rome as being largely stagnant due to most people's unfamiliarity with the ancient world. Instead they compare Rome to the early middle ages in Europe as the barometer of a successful society for some reason.
This is my final statement on these matters, I have no interest in "debate" or conversation with someone who has no idea about what they're discussing and clings to strong value judgments over reason.
As someone who has studied these things for a very long time, perhaps longer than you've been alive, I have tried to help, but it is tedious.
Just to poke a few no-history-required holes in your surety!
I wouldn't be so sure. "Imperātor" is a Latin word meaning "leader" or "commander." "Rex" is the word for "king" which was what the kings of Rome (that is, the emperors) were too ashamed to call themselves. Instead they projected power through endless propaganda while they claimed simply to be "first among the equals" (Princeps).
Rome existed for more than a thousand years, and for five hundred of those years there was only an emperor (who didn't refer to himself as a king). I will give you that Rome was good at building but that doesn't stop it from being a dark age. And while Greece was mostly left alone they did not "flourish" and their output significantly decreased. The Romans were anti intellectual and cared more about their traditions than understanding the world. That's why the Romans used Greek statue building techniques to make status of themselves and of the Emperor instead of the gods like Greece did. To Romans they were their own gods. They didn't care about the natural world or about philosophy. They actually became better at statue building than the Greeks (after hundreds of years) which would probably be listed by you as a "Great Roman Achievement" but it's just the result of Aping Greek culture. The Romans themselves were in a sense aware of this; they would use Greek in official documents and would at times dress up in Greek Togas/Chitons. Caesar's Et tu, Brute? was actually spoken in Greek.