"All right... all right... but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?"
They've done a few nice things (let's say the baths, but not much else), but their instincts are certainly not friendly towards openness. It's tactical cooperation, kind of like in the saturday morning cartoons where there's always one episode where the bad guy has to cooperate with the good guy for some reason, and it turns out they work well together, and the good guy suggests the bad guy give up his evil ways, but it of course never happens.
