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.