Roman Advancements
This thread is in response to claims sometimes made to the effect of supposed intellectual stagnation of the Roman Empire, evidenced by quotes like this one:
In this thread I will endeavor to refute them.Originally Posted by Louis XI
Architecture:
This is of course the easiest place to start with. Underneath the similarity amongst the surviving ancient Classical buildings, Roman buildings look somehow different from the Greek, as any student of Classical history will know. There are several reasons for this difference, reasons which are all fundamental:
- arches
- cement
- bricks
Arches, vaguely familiar to the outskirts of the Greek world, were never seized upon on a widespread, cultural, scale. If the reader reflects on what it is that to him makes the Roman buildings look different, he will realize that it is the love of the arched, curved interior, which makes Roman buildings soar into the sky to a degree that would have been unthinkable to the Greek. We must remember the crucial fact: Greek architecture until the end remained the simple post-and-lintel system, where you raise a few central vertical blocks, and upon them place a few central horizontal blocks. Although much more refined than the Stonehenge, we must realize that it is not fundamentally different from it. A revolution occurs in the Roman period when the post-and-lintel system is thrown out, and replaced by pier-and-arch system, and it is this that explains the distinctive difference of Roman buildings, as well a their much greater height. The engineer G. Baldwin Brown reflecting on one of the minor structures on the outside of the Roman world, said of Pont Du Gard:
Cement is another Roman aspect which bears crucially on ancient architecture. This compound, which holds pieces of stone together, was not known to the Greek world, and was also forgotten during the subsequent Middle Ages. In tactile strength said to have not been equalled until the 18th century, the central importance of cement for architecture was emphasized by Lynne Lancaster in her groundbreaking 2005 book, Concrete vaulted construction in Imperial Rome.
Cement was invented around Rome during the 3rd century BC, during the period when we still think of Romans as largely subservient to exported Greek influence. For all that it may have been, yet we already begin to juts of creativity and independence, and before the Republican period is over Romans are building buildings that the Greek world has never seen. During the 2nd Century BC the arch and cement principles were applied at the startlingly creative Temple of Fortuna Primigenia. Already this structure is nothing like anything seen in the Greek world, yet some errors were made, some vaults still fell through, and several centuries of trial and experimentation had to pass before the Romans acquired the full proficiency and technical mastery in the new medium, present in such 1st century AD masterpieces as the Pantheon (unimaginable in the Greek world). There is one more aspect to this: the Roman cement is able to set under water. How the Romans invented this compound is unknown, but present it is, with the result that they constructed piers, roads, and even whole buildings on water, explaining the great size of Roman harbors, massive man-made piers jutting out into the ocean.
The brick should not be forgotten in the category of architectural revolutions. Bricks allow the creation of modular construction, of standardization of materials which allows the creation of buildings at a speed and efficiency unthinkable prior to its invention. We should not think of bricks as a modern invention and approach to architecture, as even the most routine Roman buildings in Pompeii exemplify its construction.
In no uncertain terms, Romans have revolutionized architecture in the West. Lancaster had the following thing to say as the very first thing of her first chapter:
Concrete vaulted structures represent one of the Romans' most original and enduring contributions to the artistic and architectural patrimony of the Mediterranean world.
Law:
We often hear of Roman attainments in law, but don't often know what that means, or how commensurable it is with fields we do know about. Legal theorists of the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD attained the peak of legal brilliance, at least according to Hooke, Blackstone, and other such jurists who like titans formulated modern jurisprudence, yet considered themselves but students to the Romans. The Roman jurists applied philosophy to law, and created an encapsulation of human freedoms, and legal procedure, that cast a huge and indelible shadow on all of the succeeding European history.
It may be surprising to some, but rights of man were the most protected under the Roman Law until the advent of the 19th and 20th centuries. Under the Edict from Antoninus Pius, no man in the empire, be he the emperor himself, could kill or hurt a slave. It will surely come as a shock that something as fundamental as habeas corpus, commonly thought to derive from British Common Law, comes from old Roman Law itself. The jurist S.P. Scott who wrote the definitive commentary on the Civil Law, writes:
There are other issues concerning liberty:
Even something as campy and simplistic as "my home is my castle" was made by Romans into a principle, that at the boundary of your home the powers of the outside society, even emperors, became severely curtailed.
And there are many more such statements, many that would, in time, provide the legal basis for the abolishment of slavery from human society:
Yet the centerpiece of Roman law, what most endeared it to all subsequent jurists, was the conceptual clarity of its statements, the terseness and aversion to bloatness amongst its pronouncements, that so strongly characterizes modern legislation (1000-page bills and enactments being quite common). It is precisely this ability that inspired America's Founding Fathers to condense the US Constitution, the whole law of the land, to two type-written pages. In the minds of men like Gaius and Ulpian, even the most difficult concepts were defined during the years 100-200 AD simply and succinctly:
-"Justice is the constant and perpetual desire of giving everyone his due." (Institutes, I.1.10)
-"Law is the art of knowing what is good and just." (Digest, I.1)
-"Custom is the tacit consent of the people confirmed by long-established practice." (Rules of Ulpian, 1)
-"Liberty is the natural power of doing what we wish, unless prevented by physical force or law." (Digest, I.5.4)
-"Slavery is an institution of the law of Nations wherein one man is subjected to the control of another, contrary to nature." (Digest, I.5.4)
S.P. Scott writes:[Gaius, Institutes, I.1.7: "...decisions of those who are authorized to define law."] Note: from the fragments it contains we can form some idea of the vast knowledge and attainments possessed by these old Roman lawyers, whose works have perished, and whose names would hardly be known, were it not for the compilation of Justinian. As legal dicta they are, as a rule, models of perspicacity and conciseness. Their language is terse, comprehensive, elegant. The ingenuity with which their conclusions are formed is admirable. The dominating sentiments which pervade them are a love of truth and a reverence for justice, qualities, it is scarcely necessary to add, which do not always characterize modern legislation.
Thus when we look at the Wiki legal map of the world, we see that half of the world lives under the system the Romans had created, and even the other half lives under the system that derived from it. For yes, even the British Common Law was but a copy of the Roman, made by the early British jurists:
Medicine:
Science is yet another of those topics which can be addressed very easily. To begin with medicine, quite simply Galen was the greatest doctor and biologist of antiquity. I won't go into his many books and accomplishments, which can be found quite easily on Wiki and elsewhere. I'll focus on one aspect of his genius, neurology. Galen was one of the first to demonstrate that thinking happened in the brain, all of which is detailed in a highly technical and specialized study, Galen On The Brain, which conclusively proves that he was the greatest ancient neurologist in addition to his many other talents.
Yet lest it be mistakenly said, as it sometimes is, that Galen was a "Greek", working in a fundamentally Roman (i.e. alien) world, Galen's greatest collaborator and teacher was one he calls Marinus. He writes in Commentary upon 'Nature of Man' VI.k.xv that after Erasistratus no substantial anatomy was done until Marinus and Numisianus (who were his teachers, both Romans). This Marinus seems to have made a number of medical discoveries during the 1st century AD, and to indicate the kind of specialized knowledge possessed in the period, Galen records in Works 3 an excerpt from book 6 of Marinus' Treatise On Anatomy, a description "of the cartilaginous bones of the knee on either side".
Numisianus was of highest eminence during 150s AD, and young Galen tried to gain admissions to his lectures in Rome and Corinth as he himself states (On the Affectations of the Mind, I.1). This Numisianus wrote multiple books on medicine, including ten books on surgery. All these doctors, Marinus, Numisianus, and Galen who was taught by them, were themselves originally taught in lectures by the Roman doctor Quintus, of extraordinary reputation during the 1st century AD, whom Galen references by Greekly-spelling his name, "Kointos".
One of the mistakes Galen made was believing in the efficacy of bloodletting, which was only proven to be wrong in the late 19th century. Yet as he records in his book On Bloodletting, he was already sharply criticized by the doctors in Rome, and that they strongly objected that it would not work. It was their medical criticism that forced him to write his own treatise of 3 books in which he defended the decision.
Adds John Watson in The Medical Profession in Ancient Times:
Having ventured beyond the limits of the capital, we may remark that many of the physicians who taught or practiced there, had been educated in Asia Minor, in the cities of which were many flourishing though now forgotten schools. The names of several distinguished Roman professors, were associated with Ephesus. Among these was Magnus, a writer on the pulse, and the inventor of theriacae after the manner of Heras and Andromachus. Of this same school were the anatomist Rufus, and the second as well as the third Soranus.
Such was the intellectual situation in the Empire during the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, a felicitous center of science, inheriting discoveries during the Greek period yet in a vigorous intellectual climate magnifying much more upon them.
Other topics of Louis XI's startlingly broad and uneducated statement will follow, if there's interest.
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