I'm not sure that's really the case. The fundamental issue with the idea of a Roman Industrial Revolution isn't that Rome didn't have the technical antecedents (although that's still a big issue), but rather that the Industrial Revolution only solves problems that Rome didn't have.

One of the big, if easy, mistakes to make about history is to assume that a historical society is just like modern society at a lower tech level. Bret Devereaux is fond of dunking on George R. R. Martin's question "but what was Aragon's tax policy like?" as malformed because Gondor is a polity that doesn't really have the capacity to have a tax policy in the first place (it's pretty clearly modeled off of something like the Byzantine state). Not that Tolkien is immune from this either--the Shire suffers from being a Victorian-era English countryside being transplanted to a ~15th century tech level.