Ancient Rome's failed building projects
historytoday.com
historytoday.com
Or maybe they just flooded the tunnels too but hoo boy is that gonna suck to clean up.
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.
Something something HS2…
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.
You can feel just how fast we are moving monthly.
Progress in terms of actual improvements to human lives has been very limited.
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
(Seneca, Of clemency)
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.
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.
Why Did So Many Christians Support Slavery?
~ Key reasons advanced by southern church leaders
https://www.christianitytoday.com/history/issues/issue-33/wh...
Rich people might have a couple, but in the middle age slave labour was negligible.
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period (also spelt mediaeval or mediæval) lasted approximately from 500 AD to 1500
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.
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 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.
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. )
With references for you to read should you wish.
You're aware that entire cities in Europe were considered hubs of the slave trade during the period in question?
Worth checking out.
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.
Or the Empire couldn’t expand anymore, so there weren’t any more slaves from conquered peoples.
I was particularly enchanted with the baths / gymnasium / fastfood joint. Could easily imagine living in that place quite satisfactory.
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.
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.
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.
I’m growing my own backyard vegetables? Challenging but rewarding. I’m part of massive factory farming? Less enthused.
I think this can be generalized across a lot of industries, and I think it boils down to our human need to feel like we’re more than just a small cog.
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...".
I think knowledge work can go the same way.
All of knowledge work is very alienating.
Neither as much when you're a slave of course.
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?
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).
That's 600 years - even giving you that date, we agree!
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.
Technology mostly didn't go backward, societal organization did. Rome was nowhere near industrial revolution.
https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
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'.
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).
Infrastructure, commerce, population, etc. I'm sure we can cherrypick a few things, but it's really not comparable.
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?
> You're cherry-picking
I could say the same
The lack of a central empire meant that you don't see the massive projects that require pooling the resources of a giant empire.
But the skills of individual artisans kept being honed and passed down the generations and the effects are visible.
An example is full body plate armor of late middle ages. That's a marvel of technology and you get there with incremental improvements over centuries.
The core idea has been attempted since antiquity but it was way too heavy to be practical.
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?
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 :)
How many centuries did that take? We can always find a few examples in a vast world.
After 2,000 years surely we should have found a more realistic means of judging projects and success than the upfront guesstimate …
* 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.