I have to second this comment. As a classicist, the common factor throughout a lot of Roman stagnation is that you just simply do not have the incentive to create mechanical options if you have a (seemingly) limitless number of slaves to do your tasks for you, from working in mills to mining silver to being your doctor and your tutor and so on. It's also probably one of the factors that led to such a total and sudden loss of knowledge on a lot of subjects once the entire thing collapsed, because once you're no longer forced to stay with your "owner" on pai...
I'm including this wikipedia article because it's actually a pretty good summary of the text/writer in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitruvius.
While I agree that their counting system was not super useful for a lot of complicated mathematical or theoretical stuff, what you get instead is a lot of architecture, engineering, etc. that has familiar ideas in different terms. What you see if you look into the technology Vitrivius described is that they had a lot of "industrial" things (cranes, siege engines, etc.) but these were all constructed/... (read more)