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Originally posted by Alexander01
More claim than the Romans -- the Romans' culture, architecture, philosophy, religion, and even their world outlook were all copied from the Greeks.
More claim than the Romans -- the Romans' culture, architecture, philosophy, religion, and even their world outlook were all copied from the Greeks.
Not entirely- the Romans 'borrowed' a fair bit from the Etruscans.
" The Romans, who began to dominate the area from the 3rd century BCE, in turn absorbed Etruscan innovations in architecture.The few surviving examples of Etruscan building methods anticipate developments in Rome in the use of the round arch, which, extended into a semicircular tunnel, forms a barrel vault. The Porta Augusta in Perugia shows the use of the barrel vault in its vast entranceway. The round arch rises from vertical supports or jambs, and is formed of precisely cut, wedge-shaped blocks or voussoirs. The keystone is the central stone at the apex, which closes the arch. Etruscan temple architecture took on the plan of early Greek temples, raised on a podium with a projecting, roofed porch supported by columns. Mud brick was used, the columns and entablature being of wood. The temple roof often served as a base for a dazzling display of terra-cotta sculpture. This porch façade would later be used by the Romans in their temple plans.
The Etruscan city was laid out on an orthogonal grid plan with two intersecting main streets. The city's business center and public amenities were at this intersection. This plan would be further elaborated upon by the Romans into sophisticated urban infrastructure. The Etruscans made house-shaped funerary urns and decorated the inside of tombs to resemble house interiors, leaving an excellent record of their domestic life behind. The Roman domus, or house, would also borrow from the Etruscan example. "
" Roman portraiture undoubtedly continues the Etruscan tradition. It was a common custom in Etruria to decorate the urn containing the ashes of the dead with a lid in the form of the human head (such urns are called canopi), and the same desire to record the features of the departed produced the waxen masks, or imagines, which were preserved in the houses of the Roman aristocracy. In architecture, too, Roman builders learnt much from their Etruscan neighbors, from whom they borrowed the characteristic form of their temples, and perhaps also the prominent use of the arch and vault. But the stream of Etruscan influence was met by a counter-current from the south, where the Greek colonies in Campania provided a natural channel by which Hellenic ideas reached the Latin race; and Roman architects soon abandoned the purely Etruscan type of temple for one which closely followed western Greek models. "
Interesting table of Graeco-Roman gods and their Etruscan equivalents:
what of black russians?
I'd hate to imagine what Yellow Russians taste like. 
I figured the support for the Greeks would be in the 90% range.
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