The Roman empire was one of the largest empires, if not the largest, from our past. Their territory stretched all through Spain, France, and Southern Europe, including Greece. They also had Turkey, the northern coastline of Africa, and more than half of England. As you can tell from the map they were very dependent on their expansion and trade. They had many waterfront cities where they could trade goods and ideas to the distant parts of their empire. For this reason, and also because of records, many ideas survived to our time and we sought to use these ideas in our world.