We know the Romans were great engineers; they built roads and aqueducts and things of that nature arguably superior to things that are being built today in some respects. They also had highly naturalized art, eloquent speech and writing; everything we would consider real culture, and in most respects far superior to the thousand years that followed, at least in Europe.
But did the Romans themselves invent any of it? Or was it all stuff that they got from their various conquests (notably the various nation-states of Greece) and synthesized together (an impressive achievement in and of itself), sort of like the Japanese manufacturing of the 70s and 80s?
Or am I all wet altogether? I’m a complete dilettante, so that’s entirely possible.
ETA: God, it’s so great to have a place where you can come and ask things like this. This question may belong in GD or IMHO, btw.
I think it’s impossible to exist in an advanced technical society like that an NOT invent things. The Roman ODOMETER, for instance, doesn’t have any obvious predecessors anywhere (especially in Greece) thaty I’m aware of
Romans might have been insufferable snobs when it came to social class, family connections, wealth, politics, and snubbing foreigners. But when it came to technological innovation, they were sensible enough to adopt, confiscate, annex, steal (call it what you want) inventions on the practical side. As a society (painting with a very large brush here), Romans valued hard work and toil over cleverness, and preferred to reap the fruit of other nations’ discoveries (particularly the Greeks). Naturally the cheapness and easy availability of slave labor meant that many discoveries, particularly labor-saving devices, were seen more as toys or curiosities than as something of real value.
The Romans were excellent engineers-nothing the Greeks did ever came close to them. For all their genius, the Greeks did not have the arch-they were limited to lintel and column construction. Plus, the Greeks could never build bridges and domes. The puzzling thing-after a burst of innovation, the Romans stopped-their technology was the same in the 4th century as it was in the first. No innovation, and no progress.
Can we have a more substantive cite than Wikipedia for this?
Since such a device, if invented by the Romans, would have been made primarily out of wood, I suspect it would not have survived the sands of time. Therefore, I would also suspect our only knowledge of such a Roman device would come from some literary source. Accordingly, do you CalMeacham know of this source? (I ask out of curiosity.)
That was just the easiest reference to it to find. There was an exhaustive article on this in Scientific American Vol. 245, #4, pp. 188-200 October 1981.
Lindsay Davis later used it as a mjor plot element in one of her Marcus Didius Falco mysteries.
See also:
Sleeswyk, Andre W. “Vitruvius’ Waywiser”, Archives internationales d’histoire des sciences Vol. 29 (1979), pp. 11-22.
Thanks CalMeacham. It is incredible, though; I attend one of the biggest research universities in North America and I have no access to either of those articles.
If I could have, I’d have said. It was one of the ones shortly after she stopped trying to work the name of a God + Metal into the title. (Her earluiest ones had named like Silver Pigs, The Iron Hand of Mars, Poseidon’s Gold, Vebnus in Copper, etc. But I think it got too hard and too limiting to try to keep coming up with such titles, so she gave it up altogether. It was one of the first three or four after she gave that up that the Odometer showed up. The one where they’re in Spain.
I don’t think that’s exactly true. There were, IIRC, advances in metalurgy and numerous social advances, which required similar developments and so forth. They created, for example, bureaucracies and administrative structures. Agriculture changed, too. Military knowledge grew and changed. But the rate of change probably did slow down, and I thinkit was because they fundamentally reached the limit of what was possible. The arch, for example, didn’t require any new fundamental advances.
The so-called Dark Ages, however, saw a lot of advances. Agriculture expanded considerably and so forth. This required more metal for improved plow designs as well as horses to pull them. A lot of engineering knowledge was lost, but at the same time newer ideas and practices developed. SO, it may simply have been partly a matter of time and finding the right “jump” technology or idea to open up new options.
CalMeacham, Thanks - Having been reminded I may go back and reread them.
I don’t know about that. The invention of the pointed Gothic arch rather than the round Roman arch allowed “lighter” structures and the building of the great cathedrals of the middle ages.
Or you could go straight to the main primary source on Roman odometers, courtesy of Project Gutenberg: Vitruvius’s discussion of them in The Ten Books of Architecture.
The library should have a copy of Ancient Engineers by L. Sprague de Camp. He covered the topic of Roman engineers and their various inventions in considerable detail. Copies galore are also available on Amazon, starting at a penny.
