like it did in Ancient Greece…something i always wanted to know
Ever try to add in Roman numerals?
Romans were too busy conquering the world and administrating the empire. The Greeks sat around the agora and argued.
However, it was a mark of prestige to have a Greek tutor for the kids, so the whole philosophy bit continued without a real interruption.
Could part of it be that Greece was de-centralized into dozens of city-states, but Rome was absolutely centralized?
If you have lots of city-states, you’ll have lots of viewpoints. People from Athens will have different values than people from Corinth.
Rome was too emphatic about homogenizing. Like milk. Everybody the same, marching in step. Having a different viewpoint wasn’t admired.
Presumes facts not in evidence
Romans were essentially practical and reduced everything to the Almighty As: higher mathematics didn’t pay the rent.
On the other hand, they were excellent engineers — the prime secret of life is to over-engineer — and kept many tame philosophers around as pets.
Greek numerals are no walk in the park.
Exactly. Pondering about the origin of beauty was not going to get those aqueducts built.
They certainly knew all about Greek mathematics and philosophy and continued to teach those subjects:
Possibly because many of them went to Greece to philosiphise?
But of the pure Roman ones, I’ve read Lucretius, Pliny, and Cicero. Not that I can remember what they said - it was 30 years ago, after all.
Stoics and Epicureans not philosophical enough for you? Seems like a pretty meaningful contribution. Heck, Marcus Aurelius is mentioned in every basic philosophy class (kind of as an oddity, but it still counts).
Wasn’t knowledge of some facets of mathematics necessary for all their engineering projects?
Yeah, but a lot of it was done without really much in the way of representative math; some building of models, some geometry, some scaling up, but algebra hadn’t been invented. Mind you: it’s not so different from Gaudí hanging chains to model his ceilings upside-down rather than using a not-yet-invented numeric analysis program.
As others have already mentioned, the Romans were more practical-minded than the Greeks. The philosophers you mention tend to be practical philosophers, concerned with how best to live life.
It may be that it was the Greeks, not the Romans, who were the anomaly, in being interested in impractical matters, such as pure mathematics and philosophy, for their own sake. From the Wikipedia article on pure mathematics:
Has there been any other pre-modern society that has been anywhere near as interested in pure reason as the Greeks?
The Roman engineers obviously knew some mathematics, but they did not create any. That was all done by the Greeks and Babylonians. I remember reading somewhere that the Romans built one aqueduct that had a slope of 6 feet per mile. That’s just over .1%. That’s amazing. But they did nothing comparable to Archimedes. Actually, until Newton came along, nobody did anything comparable to Archimedes.
The Romans were more practical than the Greeks. They really got into Engineering in a big, big way. Anything that obviously contributed to that was highly valued and developed.
The problem with being so practical minded is that seemingly useless knowledge oftentimes turns out to be quite useful.
The Romans were also quite rigid in altering their basic culture. E.g., they valued land ownership a lot. Merchants who got rich selling grain and such were looked down upon and excluded from the higher political circles. But if you owned a thousand acres, your were Mr. Wonderful, even if you were going broke.
I think the two were tied together. If they valued alternate ways of getting ahead in life, then alternate ways of making that happen would have developed more.
I was just in Barcelona on vacation and the tour guide at Sagadra Familia mentioned the chains.
Funnily enough, I recently purchased a book on him. It’s in my to-read pile.
I bought The Meditations in 2001 and it’s been on my ever growing to-read pile since.
The Romans did not produce mathematicians. in fact, all of the mathematicians of classical antiquity were Greek…like Pappas of Alexandria…who was also the last.
Downloaded a free Kindle copy a couple of weeks ago to read on a plane flight.