Like most Python material that ceased to be funny decades ago thanks to people quoting it endlessly...
The Romans were true imperialists. They considered their opponents to be barbarians, and claimed they lived in wastelands. The truth is more complex. In many places — yes, including Judaea — they inherited infrastructure and buildings. Judaea was previously occupied by the Greeks and a number of other civilisations had left behind remains. The idea that it was terra nullis or a tabula rasa is nonsense. Even Gaul which was considered to be a frontier already had a road system (some of which has been only rediscovered in recent times), and what is now Marseilles was a Greek city going way back before the Roman conquest.
> Romans were true imperialists. They considered their opponents to be barbarians
The Romans also aggressively appropriated from and integrated the people they conquered, extending the concept of citizenship and thus what it meant to be Roman in the process.
Nobody is saying the Romans came across terra nullis. But describing their engineering and culture as "merely improving roads" is silly.
