Humour me for a moment

Greek civilisation preceded West European expansion by many years and it is often accorded a further kind of precedence. The Greeks made so many early steps in maths, philosophy and literature, it is argued. We just end up recycling their ideas in so many fields. They were therefore "better", and modern civilisation is degenerate by comparison.

Imagine for a moment that these things happened in a different order, with Britain, France, Germany etc developing the resources to support a rich country by 100BCE and Greece following on 1500 years later. Might Shakespeare and his contemporaries have developed all the basic themes of poetry and drama, and Roger Bacon of philosophy? Might Euripides have written a version of Hamlet? Might the French have had a word for it?

As counterfactuals go, this one is so hard to set up that it falls almost immediately. Just hold on to it for long enough to wonder whether the "superiority" of a culture relates to anything more than its coming first.