‘What I want to know is, what have the Romans ever done for us?’

I flipped around to look at the questioner, two bus rows behind me. We were halfway through the exhaustingly long road trip and I was glad to be distracted by Gareth’s question. Gareth is the lone non-engineer on my course.

‘Erm. Roads? Sanitation?’ I suggested. Engineers are pretty keen on these sorts of things.

Gareth (a physicist) waved these off.

‘Aquaducts?’

‘Democracy?’

The contributions were coming in thick and fast. All were summarily dismissed. ‘Just minor civilisation building stuff,’ was the critical evaluation.

‘What about the calendar?’

Gareth brightened. ‘Yeah, okay. The calendar was pretty good. I’ll give them that.’

‘And blood thirsty spectator sports?’ I murumured. But it was too late and the conversation had moved on.