The history of recorded civilization is a history of bureaucracies and administrative structures. Rome did nothing to “invent” either bureaucracy or a system of administration. They certainly added to them, but they definitely did not create them.
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Ah, but these things were not known to the Romans, nor did they borrow the structure of the nations they conquered in that respect. Yes, you can say it was reinventing the wheel, but they did in fact invent it. And their version was designed to suit their needs in a manner the bureaucracies of some (maybe all) other countries couldn’t.
Not really a device, per se, in the sense “an invention” is usually understood, but more of a conceptual breakthrough: It was in Rome that the notion of the public calendar came about. The actual structure of the calendar (solar, 365 1/4 days, etc) was borrowed from Egypt by Caesar, replacing Rome’s highly inaccurate lunar version, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Rather, the actual calendar itself was the closely held intellectual property of the politicized priesthood; it would be announced when a month had ended and a new month was beginning, but the means by which this passage was calculated was a secret. As such, these periods were manipulated to serve various political aims: A favored ruler’s term might be extended, and a rival’s term might be truncated, for example. It wasn’t until Rome that the mechanisms of the calendar were laid bare, that the months and days were laid out in a publicly inscribed display so everybody could see how long everything lasted. That’s a fairly significant innovation, and changed the way society functioned, from farming to trade to taxation.
(Source: I’m currently reading this, which is lightweight and breezy but still fun and pretty informative.)