Kim Bowes: belief

Transcript context

…In terms of technology, one reads various crackpots suggesting the Romans had much more advanced technology than we had thought, but those views to me are not obviously wrong. I’m not persuaded by any single one of them, but you’ve revised the historical picture enough. Do you ever have thoughts about Roman technology being quite a bit more advanced than what we had thought? I think what the maximalists of Roman technology would argue is that the Romans didn’t invent too much that hadn’t already been, at least in the works, in the Greek world. What they did was make it bigger and increase the size of everything, from all kinds of water-powered devices, which is mostly what we credit them with, to the expansion of the use of mortar and inventing mortar that’s set underwater, which is a huge innovation. The Romans are not so much inventors as they are giganticizers. They make everything bigger, and they expand the scale. What I wish I could see more of, but still don’t see, is ordinary people having access to this technology. We still can’t see water wheels, for instance, being used on small farms. That would be a game-changer to my mind, but we don’t see that yet. I can only think of a handful of examples where we can see small farms with water power. Agriculture is the biggest industry. They make their looms really big, so textile manufacturing is the biggest industry after agriculture. Their looms get bigger. Do they really change textile manufacturing? They don’t ever invent the spinning wheel, as far as we can tell. That was a game-changer. I’m a maximalist, if you like, on the matter of scale, but it still bothers me that there isn’t the trickle-down effect into ordinary people’s economic lives that we see, say, beginning in the 18th century in Northern Europe. When Romans go, say, to Ptolemaic Egypt, where science was quite advanced, did they have science envy, or they don’t care, or it’s ho-hum, or they already knew it? How do you interpret that?…

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