RE: A documentary on the Roman empire
January 14, 2013 at 12:07 pm
(This post was last modified: January 14, 2013 at 12:44 pm by jonb.)
I remember a story about Alexander the great deciding about building one of the many cities built in his name.
He admonished a planner for proposing a city that would have to have a water supply brought to it by aqueduct, because it would be expensive hard to defend and a burden to service. Much better to build the city where all the amenities are at hand.
This is probably why Alexander's cities still exist, where so many Caesareas are magnificent ruins which depict how superior the Romans were.
When You talk about the Romans, are you not talking about, developments and uses by people of the Mediterranean area. What the Romans did do was over exploit the ground to the point I head it said on the radio that it took Italy five hundred years to recover from the agricultural systems the Romans used. The dust bowl of the Midwest in the thirties was nothing like as bad as that of north Africa under Roman governance when all the trees were cut down to make bigger fields. Some of the Roman ports are now a mile away from the sea.
If you want to look at agricultural machinery the Celts were already using most of it.
Part of the problems the late Roman Emperors had was that they did not have land to settle veterans from the army on. This was not because they did not have land which was not being used, but that they did not have the technology of the 'stupid barbarians' that could turn the land to agriculture.
A feudal peasant who was expected to own his own livestock, had right of access to his own land, to build on common land, had a set of prescribed duties to the master, but outside that was free to do as he/she saw fit.
Duties that if you compare very favourably even today.
A peasant was expected to work on average 3 days a weak for his master. In return, the peasant had, a home, land, and his own small business which his children could inherit. How many days of the week do we now have to work to pay the mortgage/rent and taxes expected of us. and we will not talk about inheritance tax.
But a Roman slave could only dream of the rights of a peasant.
He admonished a planner for proposing a city that would have to have a water supply brought to it by aqueduct, because it would be expensive hard to defend and a burden to service. Much better to build the city where all the amenities are at hand.
This is probably why Alexander's cities still exist, where so many Caesareas are magnificent ruins which depict how superior the Romans were.
(January 14, 2013 at 12:04 pm)Rhythm Wrote:(January 14, 2013 at 11:53 am)Minimalist Wrote: The Romans did prefer the practical. If they needed something decorative they got some Greek slave to do it for them.
Case in point, some of the crown jewels of technological innovation handed to us from the middle ages were completely useless to the romans - namely, ag tech. They had no use for the heavy plow, no use for the 3 field rotation - meanwhile their irrigation and water mills were vastly superior - and the romans actually utilized mechanized harvest technology.
That last bit, in fairness, was useless to feudal europe - there were plenty of peasants around to swing scythes.....
Deployment of tech is vastly more important than it's actual innovation. An advance not put to use is practically no different from no advance at all - and the advances of the middle ages were spotty in deployment at best. In the ag sector their advances merely allowed them to yield at rates commensurate with the methods used by the romans in warmers climates with lighter soils.
When You talk about the Romans, are you not talking about, developments and uses by people of the Mediterranean area. What the Romans did do was over exploit the ground to the point I head it said on the radio that it took Italy five hundred years to recover from the agricultural systems the Romans used. The dust bowl of the Midwest in the thirties was nothing like as bad as that of north Africa under Roman governance when all the trees were cut down to make bigger fields. Some of the Roman ports are now a mile away from the sea.
If you want to look at agricultural machinery the Celts were already using most of it.
Part of the problems the late Roman Emperors had was that they did not have land to settle veterans from the army on. This was not because they did not have land which was not being used, but that they did not have the technology of the 'stupid barbarians' that could turn the land to agriculture.
A feudal peasant who was expected to own his own livestock, had right of access to his own land, to build on common land, had a set of prescribed duties to the master, but outside that was free to do as he/she saw fit.
Duties that if you compare very favourably even today.
A peasant was expected to work on average 3 days a weak for his master. In return, the peasant had, a home, land, and his own small business which his children could inherit. How many days of the week do we now have to work to pay the mortgage/rent and taxes expected of us. and we will not talk about inheritance tax.
But a Roman slave could only dream of the rights of a peasant.
