I'm pretty convinced that the only reason Rome isn't remembered primarily as the first great slave empire and its downfall celebrated as a world-historic liberation is that we still live under the hegemony of the second great slave empire (I mean Western Europe and North America as a whole here) which is totally unwilling to wrestle with the way its power was and continues to be drawn from the blood and sweat of enslaved people
One of the things that's often missed when teaching history is this: the Renaissance was, at its heart, largely a very successful propaganda campaign. Renaissance Italy was an awful place to live; it was rife with war and plague; life expectancy there was lower than it had been in the middle ages. In short, the Renaissance was not a golden age following a time of darkness; it was a manufactured golden age which reached back to what had been lost in order to establish a sense of legitimacy in the desperate hope that that might create some stability for the region. So they looked back to the Greeks and the Romans, they filled their cities with art, and they warned each other in letters which cities to avoid this year because they had plague.
And then ever since (you can debatably blame the Enlightenment but the Enlightenment may have just been chasing trends here, as they often were) then Western Europe and its descendants have been invoking this same image of the Renaissance, of a hegemony that stretches back to the ancients, of a rebirth of a golden age by returning to these idealized roots, in order to manufacture their own legitimacy. And few cultures are willing to confront the atrocities committed by the empire that exists at the heart of their myths, much less their own.
(Renaissance historian and novelist Ada Palmer wrote an excellent summary of the Renaissance golden age myths around the time when people were wondering if COVID-19 would lead to a golden age "just like the Plague did"; I've learned a great deal from her blog and highly recommend taking some time exploring it.)
I didn't love The Dawn of Everything, but it was full of ideas that stuck in my head. One of them was that we tend to judge ancient and even prehistoric civilizations by the size and grandeur of the monuments they built, but the societies that have constructed grand monuments in modern history are pretty much all horrible places to live for anyone but the elite. And we should think seriously about what this says about the past.
Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
And Babylon, so many times destroyed,
Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima’s houses,
That city glittering with gold, lived those who built it?
In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished
Where did the masons go?
-- Bertold Brecht, Question of the reading worker