Rome and After

Steven Dutch, Professor Emeritus, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay

Roman Science and Technology

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According to legend, Rome was founded in 753 B.C. by the twin brothers Romulus andRemus. Originally ruled by the Etruscans, and menaced at times by Celtic invaders fromGaul (France and northern Italy), Rome grew, overthrew its Etruscan overlords, andeventually absorbed them. Rome controlled all Italy by 268 B.C. Rome's expanding powereventually brought it into conflict with the north African city of Carthage, whoseterritory also included much of Spain. In the three Punic Wars (264-241, 218-201, and149-146 B.C.), Rome progressively weakened and eventually destroyed Carthage. The Secondwar is the most famous. The Carthaginian general Hannibal in 218 B.C. took an army fromSpain, over the Alps (probably close to the Mediterranean coast) and ravaged Italy untilfinally defeated. After its defeat in this war, Carthage yielded its African and Spanishterritory to Rome. The final war, with Carthage reduced to little more than a city-state,was simply a vindictive war of aggression on Rome's part. Rome's expansion also brought itinto conflict with Greek colonies in the western Mediterranean, and eventually Greeceitself, which it conquered in the second century B.C. Julius Caesar conquered Gaul (modernFrance,) in 56-49 B.C., then staged a military coup and declared himself Emperor. In theturmoil following Caesar's coup and subsequent assassination, Egypt picked the losing sideand was absorbed in 30 B.C. Julius Caesar's son Augustus assumed the throne as firstEmperor in 29 B.C. Southern Britain was conquered in 43 A.D., the Empire reached its peakabout 120 A.D., then began a slow decline, collapsing in A.D. 476.

The Romans contributed little to theoretical science or innovation. The mostoutstanding Roman scientist was Lucretius, who wrote some surprisingly modern-soundingideas about atoms. A few other Romans, like Pliny, achieved fame as authors ofencyclopedias. These were not encyclopedias in the modern sense but rather randomcollections of interesting facts arranged by subject, and often very uncriticallyassembled. The significant feature of these encyclopedias was they were collections ofexisting knowledge; there was nothing original in them.

The Romans excelled in more practical matters. If they got their architectural stylesfrom Greece, they reached a new peak in engineering virtuosity in erecting theirbuildings. They excelled in city planning, especially water supply. Privileged homes hadlead pipes, poorer neighborhoods communal fountains. For sewage disposal they began withan open ditch, then roofed it over. If this sounds primitive, it was - China was far moresophisticated - but Europe would have to wait for Paris in the 1600's to see anythingbetter. Police and fire protection were performed by militia companies, combinations ofpolice, fire brigade and National Guard. Public fire protection consisted mostly ofkeeping fires contained. There were also private fire companies that would show up and putfires out for a price, which the hapless owner usually had little choice about. Bridgesand aqueducts built by the Romans still stand.

The list of technical innovations by the Romans is short. Far and away their greatestinvention was concrete. If a society can only introduce one invention, it could do nobetter than this. Some varieties of volcanic ash in Italy are natural concrete; the Romanssoon discovered that mixing lime with volcanic ash made concrete that would harden evenunder water. Another innovation was in the domain of books. Like most societies, theRomans used scrolls, which are clumsy. Like many other societies (like the Maya in theAmericas) they found that unrolling the scroll, fan-folding it, then binding one edge, washandier. This is termed a codex and is the ancestor of the modern book. Late in theEmpire, water wheels appeared and spread rapidly. Finally, the Romans excelled at law andadministration, and especially the codification of law. The rediscovery of Roman law wouldprofoundly influence the birth of Western science about 1100 A.D.

The Fall of Rome

In 395 the Empire was split, with the eastern half ruled from Constantinople (formerlyByzantium, now Istanbul). The eastern half endured as the Byzantine Empire until 1453 whenit was overrun by the Turks. The first barbarian invasions began in the third century A.D.in the present Balkans. After about 400 they were general; the invasions were limited notby Roman military strength but the speed and ambition of the invaders. The last emperor(by then only a puppet) was deposed in 476 A.D. In a bitter irony, he was named Romulus,the same as the legendary founder of Rome. His full name, Romulus Augustus, was given thediminutive form -lus in contempt, so he is usually listed in histories as RomulusAugustulus. The usurping German chieftain, Odoacer, styled himself as regent for theEmperor in Constantinople, as did his successors for several decades. Nevertheless, wemark 476 as a turning point; the date the pretense of a "Roman" empire wasfinally abandoned. It is more of a turning point to us than to people living then; lettersfrom people living at the time show no hint of anything significant happening. To them,Odoacer's takeover was just another palace coup.

Did anybody try to stop it? Christianity became legal early in the fourth century andthe state religion a few decades later. Many Romans attributed their declining fortunes tothe displeasure of the old Roman gods, a charge that became so widespread that St.Augustine, about 400 A.D., wrote his book The City of God to refute it. One lateEmperor, Majorian (ruled 457-461) stands out as one who attempted to reverse the trendsbut failed. Historian Edward Gibbon describes him as "a great and heroic character,such as sometimes arise, in a degenerate age, to vindicate the honour of the humanspecies." Far too late to reverse the economic stagnation of the Empire, he declareda general amnesty on taxes and reformed the taxation system. He declared severe penaltiesfor the demolition of monuments (which were being quarried as cheap sources of stone), andattempted the reconquest of North Africa. His reforms aroused intense hatred from themyriad officials who had been profiting from the abuses of the system; he was compelled toabdicate and died a few days later, supposedly of dysentery, almost certainly murder.

Hypotheses for the collapse of Rome

Lack of innovation: The best indicator of Rome's intellectual stagnation is itstotal lack of interest in geography. For an empire whose survival would depend on accurateintelligence, the Romans did almost no exploration outside their borders. A Europeanempire that intends to endure should draw its borders not along the Rhine and Danube,creating a long front to defend, but along the Vistula and Dneister, creating a muchshorter frontier from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The Romans never explored Ireland orScotland, never went into the Baltic, or to Scandinavia. The Canary Islands werediscovered in Roman times (the name comes from Latin Canis, meaning dog, from thewild dogs there), a Roman legion marched across the Sahara, there were Roman trading postsin India and even one mission to China. And that's all; the sum total of Roman explorationin a thousand years. When Marco Polo went to China, his account electrified Europe; theRomans who went to China left us nothing. The Romans absorbed the Etruscans andCarthaginians, and their languages persisted for a long time, but despite the importanceof grammar and rhetoric in ancient learning not one Roman writer left any description ofthese languages, or indeed any others.

Slavery: Cheap manual labor may have hindered the development of machines, butthe real destructive effect was the attitude that any services could be bought, andtherefore elite Romans need not bother with practical matters. A similar attitude prevailstoday in the Persian Gulf, where outside experts are often viewed as hired servants.Slavery was not just a matter of status; oarsmen and miners were often free men, whileeven white-collar workers in Rome were often slaves. The reason slavery was hated andfeared was not necessarily the hard or lowly work it entailed, but the loss of freedom.The real crippling effect was not so much slavery as the static concept of wealth in the ancientworld. Wealth was seen as precious metals, slaves, livestock, and especially land, notproductivity. Romans who did make money in technology used the money to buy land andsocial status, not improved productivity.

Religious cultism and mysticism have been cited as contributing to the declineof Rome, but are probably symptoms as much as causes. The emphasis on ever more subtlecult doctrines is an outlet for intellectual energies that have no productive outlets inan intellectually stagnant world, and people retreat to cultism and mysticism when thereal world offers no hope.

Lead poisoning has been cited as a factor, not from lead water pipes but fromlead-based ceramic glazes.

Edward Gibbon and Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

The most famous and influential work on the fall of Rome was Decline and Fall ofthe Roman Empire, published in 1782. Author Edward Gibbon suggested four reasonsfor the fall of Rome:

  1. Immoderate greatness: growth of a bureaucracy and the military. The Empire simply got too unwieldly and cumbersome.
  2. Wealth and luxury: the popular stereotype, although it has some validity.
  3. The barbarian invasions: were these a cause or a symptom, or both? The barbarian invasions certainly drove the final nails in the coffin of Rome, but the barbarians could hardly have invaded if Rome maintained its military effectiveness.
  4. The spread of Christianity: Gibbon's most controversial claim. The fact that very few people mention this cause is a dead giveaway that most people who compare America with ancient Rome have never read Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Gibbon had his own cultural biases that affected his work. Most later historiansbelieve he took far too rosy a view of conditions in the second century A.D, when hisnarrative starts. Gibbon picked that period, the high point of Roman expansion and aperiod marked by a succession of capable Emperors, as the peak from which Rome fell.Actually, many of the economic and social institutions that contributed to the decline ofRome were already in place by that time. Once he conceived of the concept of a Decline, hepushed it too far. In particular, in his view, the eastern or Byzantine Empire, whichlasted almost a thousand years after the collapse in the West, continued to declinethroughout that period. If the West declined, one can only imagine how low Gibbon thoughtthe East sank by the time it was conquered by the Turks in 1453.

Gibbon was raised Anglican, converted to Catholicism, then was packed off to school inSwitzerland by his furious father, where he absorbed the ideas of both John Calvin and theFrench philosopher Voltaire. His concept of Christianity was intensely rationalistic. Hedespised mysticism, which tended to be a prominent feature of Eastern Christianity, and hedespised the solitary monasticism of the East, as opposed to the pragmatic, technologicaland productive monasticism of the West. The Byzantine style of politics tended toemphasize subtlety, craftiness, and indirect dealings, just the sort of thing that wouldbe most repugnant to a hard-core rationalist like Gibbon. (It's no accident that we referto complex and secretive politics as "Byzantine".) To Gibbon, the fact that theeastern Empire gave rise to Eastern mystical Christianity and Byzantine politics wasindisputable proof of its continuing decay, and the further it evolved in thatdirection, the deeper its decay in Gibbon's view. Gibbon gives us a clear object lesson in theneed to beware facts that reinforce our prejudices. Nevertheless, despite itsshortcomings, Gibbon's work has endured as few works of history have.

An Alternative View of the Fall of Rome

Americans often idealize ancient Rome. We are impressed by its monuments, and many ofour buildings imitate them. Rome is the first ancient state that looks like a modernnation-state on the scale of the U.S. Latin was used as the intellectual language ofEurope until recent times. It was used in the Catholic Church until the 1960's (and stillis for official documents) and is used in law (a clumsy medieval Latin, not ClassicalLatin.) Many "religious" films about the life of Christ are actually films aboutRome with a pious veneer. Ben Hur, for example, spends much of its time onthe brutalities of Roman slavery, a Roman sea battle, the splendor and corruption of Romeitself, and climaxes with a Roman chariot race, while giving an occasional nod toconcurrent events in the life of Christ.

A reality check is due: Rome was a stagnant, corrupt, brutal and petty society. Twosuggested antidotes to the romantic view of Rome: Robert Graves' I, Claudiusand H.G. Wells' Outline of History. Graves' novel, a fictional account of thelife of the Emperor Claudius, nonetheless paints a graphic picture of the pettiness andbrutality of the Roman elite, with frequent examples of the casual murder of peoplebecause they might someday prove an inconvenience. A historical example typical ofRoman petty spitefulness is that after defeating Hannibal, the Romans pursued him for overtwenty years. Every treaty they concluded with another state included a clause requiringthe surrender of Hannibal to the Romans if he ever sought asylum. Hannibal was finallycornered twenty years later in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) and committed suicide to avoidcapture. He was not alone. Most leaders who opposed Rome effectively on the battlefieldwere eventually captured, taken to Rome, then executed as part of the victorycelebrations. The final destruction of Carthage, by then no conceivable threat to Rome, isyet another example of petty vengeance. Wells, an old-time British socialist, needs to beread with some caution, but he ruthlessly strips away the romantic and noble image ofRome. Wells points out that not once did the local populace ever rise up to oppose thebarbarian invaders, a clear sign they saw nothing worth defending in Roman society.

The pivotal and fatal decision Rome made can be illustrated by comparison with theearly U.S., which faced the same choice and made a different decision. In 1787, the UnitedStates was governed by a weak union under the Articles of Confederation, soon to besupplanted by the Constitution. The one great act of this weak government was theNorthwest Ordinance, which provided for division of new territories into additionalStates. The concept of admission of new States was incorporated into the Constitution. Hencethere is no distinction whatever between original States and later States. A citizen ofWisconsin (admitted 1848) is no different from a citizen of Delaware (first of theoriginal 13 colonies to ratify the Constitution in 1787) or Hawaii (admitted 1959; exceptHawaiians are a lot warmer in the winter).

Rome in 200 B.C. faced the same choice and made a radically different decision. Romeacquired Spain from Carthage after the Second Punic War, and faced the same question asfaced by the early U.S., what to do with the new lands? Instead of admitting the new landsinto the then-republic on an equal basis, Rome decided to exploit the new territories assources of revenue and slaves. Roman citizenship was reserved for Romans. The result wasalmost non-stop guerrilla war in Spain for over 300 years. Rome traditionally had raisedarmies for no longer than a year, a workable solution when Rome had only to defend Italy,but troops could scarcely be trained and sent to Spain before they would have to return.To fight its wars in such a distant place, Rome abandoned its traditional citizen armyfor a permanent standing army. Conscripted soldiers frequently become dispossessed whileserving in Spain; their farms fell into debt and were confiscated by the wealthy. Up untilthis time, Rome had been making erratic but nevertheless real progress toward equality.The Roman electoral system was badly gerrymandered to keep power in the hands of thewealthy; nevertheless, when civil unrest grew serious enough, real reforms and concessionswere made. This progress stopped and reversed. Power and wealth re-concentrated in thehands of the upper class. For the next 170 years, Rome experienced increasing civilunrest, ever-bloodier conflicts and civil wars, a military coup by Julius Caesar, thendictatorship under the Emperors.

In What If?, a collection of essays on alternative military history,Lewis Lapham pictures a successful Roman conquest of Germany as leading to amore moderate and civilized Europe. But that would have happened only if Romehad enough leaders capable of treating conquered lands in an enlightened manner.And Rome simply did not have enough of them. In Hannibal's day there was aprominent family called the Scipios who embodied all the virtues we like tothink of as Roman. One of the Scipios defeated rebels in Spain and temporarilypacified it with benign and just policies, but as soon as he left, Rome wentback to business as usual. Roman policy toward Carthage was largely driven bythe orator Cato, who ended every speech with "Carthage must bedestroyed." Cato was about as petty and mean-spirited a character ashistory affords, and it was his spirit, not that of the Scipios, that triumphedin Rome. Two centuries later, Publius Varus attempted to invade Germany, inLapham's words:

Choosing to regard Germanic tribes as easily acquired slaves rather than as laboriously recruited allies, he forced upon them a heavy burden of taxation in the belief that they would come to love him as a wise father.

Conclusion: Like a baby born with AIDS, the Roman Empire was infected at birth withwhat eventually killed it.

After the fall of Rome

Despite the corruption of Rome and the refusal of its populace to defend it, the lossof Roman civil infrastructure meant a real decline in quality of life. The Church wasprimarily urban and in no position to control rural areas, nor inclined much to do so. Bythis time Church leaders had absorbed a good deal of Roman elitism and love of comfort;they looked down on country dwellers and were hardly inclined to leave the comforts of thecity for rural areas. (Pagan comes from the Latin pagus, meaningcountryside, where traditional Roman cults persisted until 600 A.D and beyond. In fact, inmany ways Italian Catholicism, especially in southern Italy, has a core of Roman religionwith a Catholic veneer of terminology. The English word heathen has a similarorigin - people who lived in the heaths, or waste lands.)

There were actually two "dark ages". The first, due to the collapse of Romaninfrastructure and trade, bottomed out around 600-700 A.D. There was a revival around 800culminating in the reign of Charlemagne, but another decline took place about 900-1000 dueto the raids by Vikings and Magyars. (The Vikings of course, came from Scandinavia, theMagyars settled in Hungary. It's interesting that two of the most eminently civilizedpeoples in the world had such ferocious beginnings.)

Technological innovations in post-Roman Europe

A number of rude but essential technical improvements appeared in post-Roman Europe.

The Irish

As Roman rule disintegrated, the Romans pulled their troops out of Britain for usecloser to home; in 410 they left for good, leaving the Romanized Britons to fend forthemselves. As Rome's grip weakened, raiders from Ireland began plundering the west coastof Britain for booty and slaves. About 401, on one such raid, they captured a sixteen-yearold middle class youth named Patricius. For the next seven years, before escaping, heherded sheep for a local chieftain. After his escape, his Irish experiences haunted him;he eventually studied for the priesthood and returned as a missionary. This, of course,was Saint Patrick.

Forget the green beer and all the other silliness that accompanies Saint Patrick's Day.Patrick is a genuinely heroic figure in Western civilization for four reasons.

The Irish loved epics and sagas, and took avidly to Classical learning, especiallyheroic classics like the Iliad and Odyssey. They also wrote down their ownliterature, the first preserved vernacular literature in Europe. They never lost theirlove of heroic deeds, and with warfare on the wane, they found a new outlet in the WhiteMartyrdom, leaving Ireland for unknown lands as missionaries. The first was Columcille,who carried the Irish tradition to Scotland and founded, among others, the monastery atLindisfarne off the northeast coast of England. Ireland by this time was cut off from therest of Europe by the Saxon invasion of England. The Romanized Christian Celts of Britainhated the invaders and had no desire to convert them, but the Irish had no suchmisgivings. Aidan, successor to Columcille and first head of Lindisfarne, spearheaded theeffort that eventually converted all of northern England. About 590 A.D., Columba, anotherIrish missionary, set off for Gaul (France). By his death in 615 he has established aswath of monasteries across France, Switzerland, southern Germany and even into Italy.Other Irish travelled to Germany, the Low Countries and Denmark, perhaps even as far asKiev.

Compare the wanderings of the Irish, indeed their seeming competition to reach the mostinaccessible and threatening places, with the Roman attitude that nothing outside theEmpire was worth knowing. They are almost the first people we know of that display theidea of exploration as a heroic act, a desire to go someplace "because it'sthere." The Irish, unlike their Roman-conditioned counterparts, sought out thecountryside (and often came into conflict with urban bishops who wanted to assertjurisdiction over them.) The very act of converting and pacifying the rural areas probablyhad a profound impact on safety of travel and hence commerce. They not only convertednorthern Europe, but gave its Christanity an indigenous European flavor not derived fromthe Classical world. Of our surviving Bible commentaries from 650 to 850 A.D., fully halfwere written by the Irish. The Irish reintroduced literature into a Europe where it hadlargely been lost. At the far end of the Classical world, the Arabs were doing the samethings, but the Irish contribution was more immediate. It enabled literacy to persistcontinuously in Western Europe.

The Vikings brought the Irish flowering to an end. Lindisfarne was sacked repeatedlyfrom 793 until its abandonment in 875. All the great monasteries of Ireland wereeventually destroyed. The Vikings did create Ireland's first permanent cities (includingDublin), but by the time the Viking threat faded out about 1000 A.D., Ireland was onceagain marginalized. By that time, however, they had replanted literacy firmly enough onthe Continent to endure. Like Britain, Ireland was later invaded by the Normans, but theNormans integrated into Irish society even faster than they did in Britain. The realdecline of Ireland began in the 1500's after the Protestant Reformation and the repeated,futile, and increasingly harsh English attempts to suppress Catholicism in Ireland. TheGreat Hunger of the 19th century and subsequent emigration mark perhaps the low point ofIrish history. Only in the 20th century has Ireland begun to recover. Since 1960,especially, it has seen dramatic improvements in living conditions.

A final observation on a paradox: in their sagas and legends, as well as observationsby occasional visitors, the early Irish were remarkably casual, indeed exuberant, in theirsexual habits. In recent times the Irish have often been noted for prudishness and sexualrepression. Thomas Cahill, author of How the Irish Saved Civilization,attributes this change to a desperate desire to achieve respectability in English societyamong the English-speaking population of Ireland. He notes that the Irish were always agood deal more liberated in areas where the Irish language remained strong, and concludeswith "Anyone who has visited Ireland in recent years will have noticed that the Irishare reverting to their ancient ways."

The Puzzle of the Celts

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About 1000 B.C., the ancestors of the Celtic peoples swarmed into Western Europe.Places as far apart as Galicia in Spain, Galicia in Poland, and Galatia in Asia Minor(recipients of one of St. Paul's epistles) recall their settlement by the Gauls, as theCelts were sometimes called (map above). Yet the Celtic languages have shrunk from a vastarea of occupation to pockets on the fringes of Western Europe. The Romans never seem tohave engaged in any serious campaign to stamp out the Celtic languages; rather, the Celtsseem to have adopted the language of their conquerers with their usual pragmatism andflexibility. This raises an interesting question: to what extent is Western culture reallyCeltic with other languages and traits superimposed?

As phenomena like Riverdance show, things Celtic are currently "in." Iwould be surprised if there are not historians now writing on this very question. But afew possibilities come to mind: the Celts were flexible, adaptable, pragmatic. They didn'tsplit ideological hairs; in conflicts with the Romanized heirarchy, Irish missionariessubmitted readily, then went ahead with their own agendas. These are all traits that areprominent in Western culture. And their tendency to go to remote places simply for thechallenge looks very Western indeed.

References

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Created 13 January 1998, Last Update 21 August 2000