Quote Originally Posted by Crandar View Post
Roman bureaucracy.
No, not since Heraclitus at the latest, it was a Greek bureaucracy run by Greeks for a Greek Basileus. The system as it developed increasingly owed more to Hellenistic-era Greek kingdoms than it did to the Latin Roman Emperors.

Our modern institutions have been firstly invented by the flourishing city-states of Sumer, in southern Mesopotamia. Thanks to the continuous imitation, they were gradually adopted by their neighbors (Akkad, Assyria, Hittites, Lydia an etc.), until they reached Greece. What you decribe is a common misconception, dominant due to the fact that for historical reasons, we have much concerning the matters of Greece compared to that about the Semite or Iranian civilizations.
The Phoenician cities had an equally complicated bureaucracy with their Greek counterparts.
None of this is relevant - here in the West we read Plato, Aristotle, Xenaphon, Plutarch... we don't read anything from Iran, from any period. So, for the West, Greece and Rome are the model.

Now, it has been said that the Greece we in the West see is not the Greece that actually exists, but rather Greece as we would have it be.

That being said, although the Roman Empire was, at first, bacially a collection of cities with a varied level of autonomy, it is true that after the reforms of Diocletian, a proper bureaucracy was established. However, when the Ottomans set their foot on the Balkan Penninsula, there was no more an organised state, just a plethora of warlike baronies (the collapse of the Serbian Empire caused the creation of 23 petty kingdoms)
Why was there no more state? Because the Muslims and the Latins had crushed it in successive invasions.

what you're basically saying is the Greeks are a people with no pride in their history and no sense of common benefit. That's pretty sad, given that the same area you have being pooing on is the area that spawned both the Mycenaean Kingdoms and the later Classical City-States, as well as being the cradle of Western Philosophy in the wider sense (as opposed to Middle or Far-Eastern philosophy.