The Claim
asapScience has a video about the role of science in the society. In their video, they claim:
When we look to history we see that ignoring science has led to the crumbling of societies. Ancient Greece was a time of great learning around around ideas of space, time and light and during the subsequent Roman Empire these ideas were mostly embraced however the Romans were complacent with the learning of the Greeks and little innovation or exploration of new ideas around science and knowledge took place during this era. With shifting government and values, emphasis on reason and science slipped away and Rome eventually fell into the dark ages.
Question
Does it seem that civilisation survival/"health"/thrive correlate with technological advances / investment in science?
Does it seem legit to you to claim that the greeks were "good scientists" and it helped their society while romans were "bad scientists" and this yield to the decline of their society?
Note
I am aware the the term scientist did not exist at that time and I might well be using it poorly. One can replace the term "scientist" by "scholar", "philosopher", "natural philosopher" and "science" by "knowledge exploration" or anything else that might apply.