Rome Could Afford to Think and Chose Not To
Four centuries of wealth, peace, literacy and access to every library in the Mediterranean. Put those conditions in Baghdad or Córdoba and you get an explosion. Rome got aqueducts.
Picture a Roman senator in the second century, at the height of it. The empire runs from Britain to the Euphrates. The roads are the best in the world and will not be bettered in Europe for seventeen hundred years. The aqueducts work. The law is sophisticated enough that we still teach it.
Now look at what he is doing with his afternoon.
He is not reading a new philosophical treatise, because no Roman has written one of significance. He is not working through a mathematical proof; Rome's contribution to mathematics is close to nil. If he consults an astronomical table it is Greek or Babylonian. He is not visiting a research institution, because Rome has none. Rome's intellectual class, such as it is, consists almost entirely of Greeks, working in Greek, on Greek questions, tolerated rather than valued.
He is wearing cloth dyed by Phoenician methods, eating food seasoned with Indian spices, sitting in a room decorated with Egyptian motifs, arguing in Greek rhetorical forms, and governing under laws with Mesopotamian ancestry.
He is surrounded by inherited knowledge and has produced almost none of it.