that the Romans were pretty much just like us, and that human beings are pretty much the same bastards no matter how far back in time you go, and will be laughing at poop jokes when the final trumpet (or space rock) sounds. They're comforting, those poop jokes.

They weren't identical to us. People at the beginning of the twentieth century weren't identical to us. (And us, of course, is an immensely relative concept.) But they weren't different in the ways we're brought up to believe, I think.