The article itself is a bit light on actual specifics, but perhaps the ancient literature is less inclined to write about some project out in the provinces that didn't quite come off as planned, versus some of the eye-watering stuff they actually accomplished. I've not read Suetonius for a good 20 years or more, but I vaguely remember some piece where he recounts about having the engineering saavy to flood the amphitheatre in Rome to host mock naval battles. Well mock battles in the sense that the poor guys actually fighting and dying are only doing "pretend" battles, but you know what I mean.
A lot of ancient writers didn't shy away from writing awful things about emperors. You could say that it was for propaganda purposes of their successors, but regardless of their motives, why wouldn't they write about their construction failures as well?
Remember, we aren't talking about modern society with access to a ton of recording essentials, we are talking about a very select few educated individuals (given the overall population) that were probably preoccupied writing much more important things then a building project failure.
Attempting a public works project could still be seen as a positive thing? "Nero at least tried to build new baths, what has Domitian ever done for us?"
Sure, there were plenty of "hit pieces" in the Twelve Caesars, but in what was effectively ancient tabloid press, what will generate more interest - a story about how a given emperor's temple foundations were inadequate, or some spurious story about the emperor wanting to enroll his horse as a senator?
You've reminded me now that I've read somewhere as a kid that they would also roll a giant stone ball through a corridor around Amphitheatre, probably Colloseum in order to simulate thunder sound effect, probably demanded special floor surface. I cannot tell whether true or not, but I did read it.
I only read the first couple of paragraphs, but they imply that the architect (designer) and engineer (builder) were one and the same. Was that the case?
Which is Ancient Greek, and did not fail, but did require remedial engineering afterwards to make it work.
> Apparently, the subsidence at the spring lowered the level of the water after work had begun, leaving the tunnel too high. A separate channel had to be dug below the east half of the tunnel to carry the water itself.
“ However, Trajan still thought it important for such projects to go ahead if properly managed – the need for infrastructure and public buildings did not vanish just because previous efforts to construct them had been incompetently handled.”
Slaves. They had an Industrial Revolution, albeit one built on the backs of "biorobots." A large, double-digit percentage of the Roman population were slaves. If you exclude farmers (who were slaves to the land in a different sense), the vast majority of Romans were slaves. If you went to a market in Rome or Alexandria, you'd see slaves of various households buying groceries from enslaved shop vendors working for the landlord shop owner. Most of the people walking on the street were slaves.
Now imagine I got up to give a TED talk and told you my company perfected the humanoid robot, to such an extent that they were cheap to buy, perfectly able to understand and carry out instructions, self-replicating, needed only a little food and water as input, and able to develop highly toned skills? Can you imagine the productivity boost our society would experience?
Rome had that. Until Christianization slowly eradicated the institution of slavery, and the transition to serfdom. It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution once again gave us (mechanical) slaves that progress took off.
Those biorobots are limited to what a human is able to do. A Roman slave can only lift as much as the strongest human. A forklift can lift far greater weights, a printing press can make far more copies than an army of scribes could produce. their economic conditions and culture had them stuck in a local maxima, but what a maxima it was. What are we currently stuck in a local maxima because we're hamstrung by economic conditions and our culture? housing and zoning seems to be a big one.
I wouldn't say we are stuck in a local maxima. The world has developed intensenly over the past decade, and particularly over the past 30 years with the internet and widespread computing moving things along.
In the US, life expectancy has plateaued and wages are roughly the same as 50 years ago for people without a college degree. Internet and wide spread computing have caused one of the largest increases in mental health problems since we’ve been tracking such things.
Progress in terms of actual improvements to human lives has been very limited.
It hasn’t, it just mostly hasn’t been in the industrialised world. China, India, Vietnam and many other countries have seen tremendous advances in development in the last couple decades.
Yes, that's why scientific and technical advancements alone are insufficient for progress. It's necessary to have the right cultural and political systems in place to benefit from those advancements as well.
it's undeniable there have been vast advancements in recent times, but thinking that we can't possibly be in a local maxima in any area seems like plain hubris.
> Those biorobotics are limited to what a human is able to do
Well humans are and were able to use tools to multiply their strength so this isn’t really the limitation that could be inferred by the position and wording of this statement
At one point the senate had plans to make slaves special clothing to distinguish them, but then dropped the idea because if the slaves saw how they outnumbered their masters they might revolt.
Slavery didn't ended in Rome or Europe because of Christianization. Some 5%-25% of inhabitants surveyed during the Domesday Book census of 1086 were slaves in the thoroughly Christianized British Isles. It took a Pope to mostly end Christian slavery of other Christians but of course the enslavement of non-Christians expanded to fill that vacuum for slaves that Christian Europe didn't seem to be able to shake.
Christianity even provided a moral and ethical framework for these religious slavers to justify their enslavement of Africans and Asians and pretty much anyone they could get away with. It's not the only religion with a history that doesn't match its rhetoric but I suppose I'm not responding to a post making claims about those.
Look, the early Christian emperors passed laws making it easier to free slaves, and harder to maintain or punish slaves, citing biblical commandments. That’s a fact and you can look it up. That’s all I was talking about.
There are more civilizations in human history that had slavery than the ones who did not. So slaves can not be the differentiating factor in what the Romans achieved.
Agreed. There's nothing inherent about slaves that is more efficient than paid laborers. It's just cost and time. It can look incredible that the Romans built these huge structures, but the timescales were measured in decades. Same with cathedrals in the middle ages. If you've got 200 years to build something you can really do a great job.
Idk lots of civilizations had slaves (I almost wrote ancient, but slavery didn’t go away until less than 200 years ago, and human trafficking is still a big issue). But compare Rome with say the Spartans, who had an insanely big slave class, but who didn’t produce the same types of things as Rome.
> Until Christianization slowly eradicated the institution of slavery
That didn't really start until the eighteenth century though, did it?
Even then Christian god fearing slave owners continued running plantations in the Americas either directly or more indirectly (if British) for some time.
Slavery in medieval Europe was widespread. Europe and North Africa were part of a highly interconnected trade network across the Mediterranean Sea, and this included slave trading. During the medieval period (500–1500), wartime captives were commonly forced into slavery.
About ten percent of England’s population entered in the Domesday Book (1086) were slaves, despite chattel slavery of English Christians being nominally discontinued after the 1066 conquest.
Rebranding "slaves" as "serfs" was a smart move, but a Rose still has thorns when called by other names.
Just because:
The Church prohibited the export of Christian slaves to non-Christian lands, for example in the Council of Koblenz in 922, the Council of London in 1102, and the Council of Armagh in 1171.
doesn't mean that there were no slaves within Christian lands, it just meant there wasn't a profit to made trading across those borders (for Christian slave merchants) ...
As a result, most Christian slave merchants focused on moving slaves from non-Christian areas to Muslim Spain, North Africa, and the Middle East; and most non-Christian merchants, although not bound by the Church’s rules, focused on Muslim markets as well.
I'm not seeing any support for your "practically no slaves" assertion.
I am reading explicit mention of ongoing Christian slave merchants post Roman Empire .. which goes to my point that aside from rebranding and cross border regulation the post Roman Christians took a long long time to outright ban slavery.
So ... no support for an assertion I did not make? That seems .. random.
But a contradiction of the claim that you made?
Common knowledge would have it that slavery did not exist in medieval Europe.
However, there is a thriving body of scholarship which demonstrates that slavery was practiced widely in various forms in Europe during the Middle Ages, alongside captivity, serfdom, and other types of unfreedom.
[ What "common knowledge" claims, where that came from, ... ]
Yet into the 14th and 15th centuries, medieval Europeans continued to own slaves, trade in slaves, and enslave each other as well as non-European others. They used slaves for agricultural and artisanal labor as well as domestic, sexual, reproductive, and military service
( from an assistant professor of history whose research interests covers practices of slavery in the medieval Mediterranean, particularly the slave trade from the Black Sea to the markets of Cairo, Genoa and Venice during the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries. )
Someone whose day to day existence was mostly under their own control, so long as they stayed tied to the land and produced. Both slavery and serfdom are terrible, but they are not the same.
From the perspective of industry though, serfdom is a purely agricultural institution.
They couldn't be sold. They had rights. In general the classic school hierarchy of emperor, vassals, valvassori (dunno in english), valvassini (also don't know in english), serfs has been debunked.
Roman slavery was hereditary. I’m not a Christian apologist, but it is true that the christianization of Rome introduced laws that made it relatively easier for slaves to become freed, such that the birth replacement rate was insufficient. And aa you note, there weren’t other sources of slaves available. Eventually the number of slaves was too small to be economically meaningful.
Pompeii was amazing and (as an engineer) humbling. The roads. Build to last hundreds of years. And in a city old enough that they were indeed rebuilt. The plumbing. Steam baths. Clay sewer pipes. Lead supply pipes. Basically the tech we had until the 20th century. I'm looking forward to returning in September.
I liked Herculanum a lot more - since its excavated using modern techniques, its very well preserved, with multi story buildings, interior spaces with preserved decoration.
I was particularly enchanted with the baths / gymnasium / fastfood joint. Could easily imagine living in that place quite satisfactory.
Until of course you get sick with smallpox, or cholera, or just a simple staph infection through a small cut on your finger, which then spreads hellishly with no medical recourse except maybe amputation.
I'm being a bit tongue in cheek about the obvious that you already surely would be aware of, but one underlying, implicit tendency for many people who marvel at the sophistication of Rome and the lives of its famous figures is to subconsciously forget the grime and misery that existed between these shining examples. This was the case on a scale that today isn't seen even in the world's poorest countries.
For the vast majority of people living even in that most advanced and wealthy of ancient civilizations, mortality, disability and disease rates from all sorts of causes would have made much of life very dangerous and sometimes suddenly brutal unless you were purely lucky or particularly careful -but even then quite lucky along the way.
From failing eyesight to hemorrhoids to simple but painful dental problems, the means for dealing with these sorts of pervasive aspects of the human condition would have been either nonexistent or themselves very unpleasant.
I can't remember its name for now, but I once read an excellent book that used reams of old diary entries to describe the miseries, travails and frequent health problems of the regular inhabitants of London in the 18th century. It was positively grim and in some cases downright nightmarish.
This, mind you, at a time when sanitation and medicine were at least starting to move forward again and were placing humanity in the west right at the early stages of the population explosion that civilization is finally winding down today, apparently. I can only imagine that in ancient Rome it was no better.
Another macabre historical detail I remember once reading was that reason for why names like Septimus, Octavius, Decimus and so forth were so common in ancient Rome stemmed from many parents naming their 7ths, 8th, tenth and etc kids just by the numerical order of their arrival to save too much sentimental thought on a baby that was more likely than not going to die long before it matured. A case of grimness so ingrained to the expectations of life that a callous acceptance is taken for granted.
To your point, human life just wasn't very important then unless someone was the very upper class. Even then, killing people and power transitions was fairly common.
You also don't have to go back to Roman times to see how far we've come. Just look at child birth death rates for both the child and mother.
Especially considering that they had no engines to speak of. Everything on dry land was moved around by human or animal muscles. All the stones, pillars and concrete had to be lifted manually.
A large fraction of that workforce was enslaved, and it's not accidental that the terminology has descended into engine jargon, like master & slave cylinders, clocks, drives, etc. We have replaced the fleshy engines of the ancients with inorganic ones to the general benefit. I hope that's a good portent for the replacement of us fleshy knowledge engines by AI.
The first part if true: Romans did depend on slavery, as did most ancient societies.
I am less convinced that engine jargon is derived from that. Where the terminology is master and slave specifically, yes, but not necessarily in slave societies. Where the terminology is master and something other than slave, I do not think so.
Slave is pretty unambiguous. Master less so. To a middle aged British bloke like myself the strongest association of master that I grew up with was "male school teacher". Master craftsman is also a significant association.
He specifically said "master & slave." IDE master-slave drives are also "derived from slavery" simply because that's what "slave" means, even though the analogy doesn't make much sense (the master drive doesn't control the slave drive and isn't superior to it).
This is a slight digression, but I strongly suspect that master/slave in technical contexts originated as a pun. It was normal practice to refer to a canonical or primary object as the "master _____", with the same meaning as "main". My guess is that some point someone wanted to refer to a subordinate object, noted that "master" can also mean "owner of a slave", and the obvious pun fit well enough to stick.
I think Marxists call it "alienation of labour", quite a lot is written about this.
Loss of autonomy is definitely a factor, but also people can get disconnected from the output leading to a loss of meaning in the actual work.
At industrial scales vegetables are an intermediate step in a production / distribution chain where the desired output is actually dollars. If dumping or mulching them results in more dollars, so be it. If it tastes worse but transports better and you get more dollars, worse tasting it is. Etc etc.
You could say that the optimisation process itself results in a loss of autonomy since market structure, competition and regulation dictate what you have to do to a large extent. "Don't hate the player, hate the game...".
Theory of alienation in Marxism usually refers to the idea that social hierarchies exist because they're tied to your work. Optimization isn't strictly just production based, it can be carbon capture. Then you get to Marx's other theory: the commodity fetishiation. It's not all doom, you can fetishize some crops by making them organic, carbon negative, low water, etc.
It's fun as a hobby. It may be fun to work with your hands. I haven't heard people who do heavy labor their whole lives talk about it as fun. It's brutal to do it every day for decades, causes a lot of pain and injury, and just imagine getting out of bed for it, again, when you're 50.
Remember that the Egyptian pyramids were already around 2000 years old by the time of the Romans, as old to them as the Romans are to us now, and not surpassed for another 1000 years or so.
> Never ceases to amaze me how advanced Romans were for their time.
What they did is impressive, but how do we define the norm for their time? Every time has some doing better, some doing worse.
Also I wonder how much we compare the Romans to what came after them in Europe, the long Middle Ages when technology went backward. If technology kept moving forward at the Classical pace (whatever that is), would we be as impressed with the Romans?
> the long Middle Ages when technology went backward
What do you mean by that? There was a decline but Europe had more or less rebounded by the 11th century or so. Yes extreme decentralization meant that urbanization levels remained low and funding for major project was usually limited but overall the level of technological advancement was higher in many (and probably most) areas compared to the Roman times.
Especially in fields like metallurgy where Romans were mostly surpassed even during the "dark ages".
Agriculture was generally more advanced, medieval societies were probably more industrialized as well (e.g. watermills became much more widespread and were used for processing wool, forging etc.).
Also when we imagine medieval Europe most people are probably mainly thinking about Britain, France & Germany which were backwater economic and social backwaters (besides Italy the core areas of the empire: Greece, Anatolia, Egypt were not part of Catholic Western Europe).
I mainly meant economically and demographically (though places like Germany and Northern Gaul probably surpassed their Roman period peak a bit earlier) and not necessarily technologically.
And it's also close to 400-500 years since the real decline started in the 530-550s (plague, outfall of the Gothic wars and climate change intensifying). Or in the 3rd century which would make it closer to 800.
I'm not sure how that impacts the question at hand, whether technology went backward in the Middle Ages.
> Technology mostly didn't go backward, societal organization did.
In Middle Ages Europe people did not develop or implement technology, or even employ existing Roman technology, at nearly the level of the Romans. Who built new aquaducts, for example?
They developed, implemented, and used worse technology than the Romans often did; that's what I mean by 'it went backward'.
> In Middle Ages Europe people did not develop or implement technology, or even employ existing Roman technology, at nearly the level of the Romans
Anything to substantiate this claim? Metallurgy and agriculture were more advanced, watermills much more widespread, windmills appeared by the 12th, overall medieval Europe was generally more industrialized than Ancient Rome and relied less on manual human labour.
Of course you're right about urban infrastructure, it had declined significantly, on the other hand there weren't as many cities and those that existed had relatively low populations outside of Constantinople and some Muslim cities (Rome itself was only able to sustain such a high population due to massive wealth transfers from the provinces without providing that much in return).
You're cherry-picking. It seems to me that the reactionary anti-liberalism now goes to the extent of defending the middle ages because the Enlightenment is a political threat.
Infrastructure, commerce, population, etc. I'm sure we can cherrypick a few things, but it's really not comparable.
Not everything people say had an ulterior motive and/or is driven by some ideological beliefs (quite a bit of projection going on here I assume?).
Also we were talking about technological progress. Demographics and economic activity were a different matter (the outfall of the plague and climate change in the 6th century was very severe and recovery quite slow, e.g. if the compare to the second pandemic during the middle ages especially). Also the Roman empire had been declining for hundreds of years by that point.
And again without talking about specific regions this discussion is somewhat pointless. Based on estimates Gaul and Germany had already surpassed their Roman population peak by a million or two by ~900-1000 and it was about double by the 1300s).
OTH Italy still had a lower population in the 1500s (of course it was significantly inflated during the Roman period because of massive transfer of wealth and people from other areas).
> commerce
What makes you say that the level of commerce and trade in the Roman empire were particularly higher (and not significantly lower) outside of the Mediterranean?
> Enlightenment
That didn't start 300 year or so until the middle ages were over so I'm not sure why are you even brining this up?
I'm pretty sure there are many many individual things that have been lost/forgotten, even very important ones as concrete.
There was indisputably a loss of tech and a regression in many fronts. But technology and progress is not a one-dimensional thing so you shouldn't just focus on the cases where the regression happened and extend that to imply that there was no progress anywhere.
Progress is tied to the socio-economics climate. Advances in agricultural efficiency continued and perhaps even surpassed the roman era.
You are the only one implying that; it's just a strawperson.
You may have things to add, valuable detail about the nuance. You don't need to shoot down the other person first.
> Advances in agricultural efficiency continued and perhaps even surpassed the roman era.
It's hard to reconcile the phrases in that sentence. If it continued to improve, then it would have surpassed Roman-era efficiency almost immediately and over the years would have left the Romans far behind. What is the truth here?
It didn't improve efficiency by much for a long time. In the end of the western roman empire there were epidemics and the population was greatly reduced.
Before the plague, great amounts of land were used for crops, even if the yield was low. After the plague, they started to have cows or sheeps instead, since they needed less food.
Source: avid listener of Alessandro Barbero's lectures :)
There is a story/myth whose earliest retelling is from Petronius about that a gold or metal worker who devised a wondrous new metal and after confirming he was the only one who knew its secret was put to death to avoid upsetting the economy. It has been thought this may have been an aluminium alloy.
That seems unlikely - unless it somehow avoided making pure aluminium first, its notoriously difficult (and quite dirty) even by modern standards to rerine aluminium, due to how strong bond aluminium compounds form (which is alsow what protects aluminium from the elements once you have it - a quickly forming thin layer of aluminium oxide).
In the face of scope creep, changing requirements, unforeseeable external factors, and purely human factors (like corruption, incompetence, neglect, internal rivalries, etc.), projects always faced huge risks. Projects nowadays are vastly bigger in scope (perhaps unnecessarily so), but the usual mechanisms to control the inefficiencies of bureaucracies are not easy to scale up.
How are you sure there is a better method than the educated guess? We have sophisticated methods of guessing and risk mitigation but I don’t believe there’s a fundamentally different approach.
First off, I'm glad we all got our daily thought about the Roman Empire in today. Secondly, this author is much more qualified than me to either agree or refute this; I believe we need to be incredibly skeptical when reading about Roman Engineering failures. I wrote and researched about this, using some of Vitruvius' writings last year: https://patdel.substack.com/p/why-didnt-ancient-rome-have-a-....
* Rome was incredibly paternalistic, so pointing out the failures of others without appropriate aristocratic station might not have been quite the exercise in pure engineering that we might consider engineering to be today, even though Rome obviously made great engineering accomplishments and one might think that celebrated Roman architects could not be writing anything other than in a strictly professional manner. I think that when we read Vitruvius through a modern lens, we might think, "Oh this dude was a real professional, he makes good points," when in reality I think, at least in the example I point out in my blog post, I think he might have been using an example of failure to say, "See? Only royals, aristocrats and rich people should even try to innovate."
Granted, there wasn't liability insurance for architectural or engineering failures as far as I am aware so this belief may have been prudent in terms of saving lives, but I think there was probably a primarily social-religious reasoning for it.
The idea of the rich, hereditary classes, the father of the household, the ones in charge being the only ones, "allowed," to innovate was deeply held in Ancient Rome, much like in Confucianism and other agricultural societies that have formed through human history. "Don't rock the boat."
I don't think it was until the 1500's or so that humanity started to collectively emerge out of that type of mentality as pre-industrialization and the scientific revolution began. Eventually the aristocrats (in Europe) saw non-royals being so successful at being industrialists, they wanted in on the game and removed laws that prevented them from engaging in capitalism.
The author writes:
> Its failure became a cautionary tale of an unrealistic project that sought to go beyond what nature allowed. Five decades later, the Roman senator and historian Tacitus claimed that evidence of this ‘futile ambition’ could still be seen in the rock faces near Avernus. Interestingly, Tacitus did not blame the vainglorious and weak-willed emperor alone, but also the architects who conceived the project and were judged to have ‘frittered away the resources of a Caesar’.
I read that as the author saying that Tacitus was angling the engineering failure analysis in a political way, not a purely engineering post-failure-analysis way. E.g., the project might have even been a success but then Tacitus just lied about it, we don't know.
I think this article misses the point. First of all, it's written for entry-level readers, or advanced idiots. Second, the focus should be on lost technology and the wisdom of building past 100 years of life expectency with durable goods, and how we could leverage the best parts of this approach where it makes sense (sans climate change idiocracy).
If only the Romans had actually completed the Colosseum. It truly was a wonderful concept. Sadly it seems the engineering challenges were never the issue, only a lack of political will and shortsightedness ultimately led to the failure of the project.
