What have the Romans done for us?

From Terry Jones’ book and TV series ‘Barbarians’ makes an interesting statement - what do you think?


‘The Roman Empire, far from advancing technical and engineering civilisation, actually put it back about 1,500 years.’

Remarkable though Heron’s inventions were, they belong not to his own time (around first century AD) but to the great technological and scientific leaps that had been made by the Greeks in the preceding centuries, before Rome fully took over. It wasn’t just that the Romans were incurious and the Greeks were more intellectually alert. In the Roman scheme of things, change was a threat. The system was the system, and anyone who wanted change was an enemy.

The first approach the Romans had to the world was to try to make it all Roman; the next was to build a wall behind which Romanitus would continue unchanged from generation to generation. When in AD295 – 305, the Emperor commissioned a sort of Doomsday Book so that he could correctly tax everyone in the Empire, it was ordered that no one could ever leave their farm or change their job.

Science and engineering were stopped in their tracks, and the study of mathematics and astronomy simply ended and was lost. The wonderful books of Greek science and mathematics that survive do not come to us through Rome at all, even though Rome conquered all these lands. These texts stayed in Greek, eventually to be translated into Arabic and to be used as the basis for scientific and mathematical development by Islamic scholars whose heritage had nothing to do with the Latin world. Europe remained ignorant of all this until, still in the name of Rome, Crusaders for the Roman Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Emperor went back to the Eastern Mediterranean in the late eleventh century – the return of the Barbarians.

We have lost so much that it is hard to grasp what is missing. We tend to assume that the scraps of text that have survived are the most important, but that is clearly not so. We are at the mercy of the Byzantine and Arab copyists, who tended to stick to the easier texts and often copied out only the first sections anyway, we don’t for instance, have any of Philo’s theoretical works, which explained the principals of what he was doing.

After the Greek scientific world was put out of business, even the memory of what had been achieved disappeared. Although there are surviving descriptions of some of the machines they built, until very recently no one had really believed they existed. This had been a problem in understanding the whole pre-Roman world. Just as the Antikythera mechanism was regarded as an obviously later artefact, so Celtic mines were assumed to be much later. And, of course, reports of ancient navigations have been repeatedly dismissed as mythical and impossible in the face of what would, on a different subject, be regarded as excellent evidence.

There was a powerful cultural reason for this. After all, if they really could do these things, then the Roman Empire, far from advancing technical and engineering civilisation, actually put it back about 1,500 years. That cant be right – can it?

And what exactly were those machines in Alexandria, that were once so famous that their forgotten creator was one of the greatest men in the history of the world.
 
I think the fundamental problem with this line of reasoning is that it confuses correlation with causation.

Yes, as far as scientific and mathematical advances go, the ancient Greeks were much more accomplished than the Romans. But the social and cultural structure that led to Greek advances were already on the wane by the time the Romans attained continent-wide dominance. The same qualities that made Greece so forward-thinking, I would argue, also made it politically unstable. It was too tempting to snatch up the various city-states of Greece and to incorporate them into an empire, and that process was well under way centuries before the Romans got there: first the Persians tried, then the Delian and Peloponnesian Leagues fought over the privilege, then Philip and Alexander of Macedon achieved it. And that kind of environment was, ultimately, not conducive to the scientific and cultural advances of earlier centuries.

Rome didn't put the skids on Greek learning, they just happened to be around at the time it was happening. To say that the Romans tried "to make it all Roman" ignores that there was a huge degree of latitude in determining what "Roman" meant. In practice, the Romans incorporated everything that looked vaguely promising into their conception of themselves. Greek philosophy? Sounds good. Egyptian architectural styles? The more the merrier! And I think that's really the key to the role played by the Romans during their ascendancy: they may not have been the innovators that the Greeks were, but they knew a good thing when the saw it, and were a vital bridge between Grecian antiquity and the modern era.

And, as Faeelin suggests, it's a wee bit disingenuous to compare Rome at the time of the Grecian conquest in the second century BCE to the Rome that was affected by Diocletian's economic reforms at the end of the third century CE.
 
Rome achievements were mainly practical I'd say. Their building of the infrastracture and provding a long peace enabled the regular people to thrive in a way they couldn't in other, strife-torn, areas. Their roads allowed trade to be done with much greater facility, and their supression of piracy did the same at sea. If they didn't do such great highbrow things those things don't get a farmers produce to market in good time.
 
Rome achievements were mainly practical I'd say. Their building of the infrastracture and provding a long peace enabled the regular people to thrive in a way they couldn't in other, strife-torn, areas. Their roads allowed trade to be done with much greater facility, and their supression of piracy did the same at sea. If they didn't do such great highbrow things those things don't get a farmers produce to market in good time.

Yes- I always saw it like this. The intellectual basis of Western Civilization is Greek, it's practical basis is Roman.
 
A very fashionable view for quite a while, it is also a very problematic one. Aside from the flaw that comes with assuming that innovation stops after the Roman conquest (it doesn't), Rome most certainly does not exemplify the anti-progressive mentality it is frequently accused of. The problem lies in the fact that Greek power encompassed, as it were, the rising side of classical civilisation - a time of growing resource bases, conquest and subjugation of older civilisations - while Rome encapsulates its decline. There simply is no Persepolis treasure or Magna Greaecia for Rome to spread out with.

What we do know is that the Romans were incredibly machine-minded and more than happy to do ridiculous stunts like a swivel-mounted twin theatre that closed into an amphitheatre on a signal. The inscription on the base of Trajan's column (check it out) doesn't say 'great victor, bloody conqueror, mighty ruler'. It says 'the mountain our engineers removed here was exactly *this* high." The problem was that in Roman times, engineers didn't have the star status they had in Hellenistic times. Survival chances for their writings were therefore much lower. Philosophy - the kind that got plaudits - increasingly took on a more mystical and theonomical bent at the time, too, and that was a uniquely Greek development that only very slowly spread to Rome. So as a Roman technology genius, you could invent saltwater aquaculture and become a multimillionaire (actually happened) or become a celebrity and hope you get mentioned in an imperial biography so people remember you (also happened).

What really is a problem for the Romans is that perception is skewed against them. All the developments of the Mediterranean between around 200 BC and 1 BC are counted as 'Hellenistic', no matter who sponsored them or where they came from. The sources for the Prioncipate era record few inventions or new developments, and the documents from Late Antiquity are so numerous few historians ever bother to read them for innovation, or when they find it, ascribe it to the barbarians, or necessity. Nobody is much surprised to find apples and cherries on the Moselle, grapes on the Rhine, olives in Southern France or oats and spelt wheat in Britain, yet the Romans moist likely brought them there. Everybody is ooohing and aahing about the fact that the Brehon code includes water rights for millcourses, but nobody ever wonders how the watermill came to Ireland.
 
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