The ancient Romans were some of the best self-publicists that ever existed, and the myth of Roman ingenuity endures to this day. But were they really as great as they liked to think they were? Did they really “civilise” the barbaric savages of Western Europe and the Greek East? Well… not really. It’s widely known that the ancient Greeks were pretty brainy when it came to maths and philosophy, but they weren’t the only ones. Here’s a list of just some of the things the Romans didn’t quite do for us!

Roads and Trade

The Romans are famous for their roads. Some of their straight, paved trade routes still exist today, but were they the first to do this? Nope! Archaeologists have uncovered wooden and stone walkways built by Celtic craftsmen and engineers long before the Romans ever invaded Gaul. In fact, the “savage” Gauls seem to have been rather peaceful traders, far more civilised than the sadistic Romans. Shipping routes around the Mediterranean and beyond, stretching from the Black Sea to southern Britain, date back to the Greek Bronze Age (that’s around the 15th century BC, more than a thousand years before the Roman Republic came into being): wrecks have been found around Cyprus and Greek pottery found in Cornwall!

 Irrigation

The Egyptians had been shifting water from the Nile to their farmland for centuries, with the use of crane-like machines. The Greeks took things a bit further, thanks to the ingenious Archimedes who invented a machine for lifting water uphill, basically a screw in a tube. The Romans thoroughly ignored Archimedes’ work and even destroyed a lot of his papers when they invaded Syracuse!

Concrete

Roman concrete was very different to modern mixtures, but it allowed them to make incredible structures like the Flavian Amphitheatre (the Colosseum) and the Pantheon as well as more every day buildings, like the insula tower blocks found at Ostia. But did they invent it? No! That honour rests with the Parthians, the culture that grew from the Persian Empire after Alexander the Great destroyed a lot of it. The Parthians used it to make beautiful domed roofs, similar to those you can still see in the Middle East today.

Hygiene

Okay so we can thank the Romans for introducing public bathing to much of the world… but do we want to? Sure the baths were places to exercise, but the Greeks had already popularised gymnasia centuries before, and okay many baths were cleverly heated, but they certainly weren’t very clean. A mixture of dirt and oil floated on the top of the water, called “soilum” in Latin, yuck! The emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote that he never visited the baths since they contained nothing but oil, sweat and grease. Some big cities had sewers, Rome had its famous Cloaca Maxima, but smaller towns just had open drains. And then there’re the aqueducts. Now, Roman aqueducts were indeed incredible, spanning huge stretches of countryside on a continual slope. Frontinus boasts that their aqueducts were far greater than the idle pyramids or temples. But what were the aqueducts for? Well, unless you were rich enough to have a private stream pumped to your house, this fresh, clean mountain water went straight into the dirty baths and pretty fountains! Drinking water came from wells and cisterns, so if you didn’t use the baths (and public bathing was a rather peculiar Roman habit after all) you didn’t need aqueducts. So much for not being idle!

Image via Wikipedia

Organised Religion

Religion is a really messy area of Roman history (expect a full article on it from me in a week or so!) but the Romans would like us to think that they gave the world a more organised and civil way of worshipping, a view later exaggerated after Christianity took hold. We hear stories of the barbaric rituals of the Druids, burning innocent captives alive in enormous wicker men, or the ghastly fringe cults of Roman society, from the drunken worshippers of Bacchus to the blood soaked festivals of Cybele. Is this true? Well… what do you think? We now think that the reason the Druids were so vilified was that they presented a political threat to Rome: they were a aristocratic class of soothsayers, whose influence was far greater than that of the fledgling Imperial cults. As for the cults of Bacchus, Isis, Cybele and the like, well, we know less about them (they’re known as “mystery cults” for a reason!) but it’s pretty likely that they weren’t nearly as nasty as the sources claim, after all we have records of many upstanding citizens, even senators, involved in some of them. In the later years of the Empire, after Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, stories get even more lurid, painting tribes like the Vandals and the Huns as appalling monsters, while archaeological evidence (and sources from Gaulish and Gothic writers) suggest quite the opposite.

Civilisation

Okay, now I’m cheating a little bit, but Roman writers do rather like to paint themselves as more “civilised” than the rest of the world. Were they? Of course not! Even today we have a paradoxical view of Roman society; at once we think of mighty aqueducts, powerful generals, and noble statesmen, but at the same time vicious gladiatorial battles, decadent emperors, and ghastly persecutions. Which image is true? The answer is probably both. Although Roman writers didn’t like to admit it, the common people just loved seeing things get killed in horrible and messy ways, and later developed a taste for erotic aquatic displays, while the upper classes loved wine and women and were generally pretty hypocritical!

Let’s look at that in contrast with the rest of the world at the time. The Greeks preferred athletics and witty theatrical productions, busying themselves with art, mathematics and philosophy. We even have an amazing clockwork planetarium dating to the late Classical period, the likes of which wouldn’t be seen again for thousands of years. Okay so Greek men were rather keen on rowdy drinking parties and pretty young boys, but these were past times that didn’t involve people getting killed! Although the Romans were quite keen on some of the Greeks’ artworks, a lot of them only survive through Roman copies, but this interest meant a lot of statues were moved from their original home and lost, including priceless works like the chryselephantine (ivory and gold) statue of Athena from the Parthenon at Athens. The Parthians were a similarly arty bunch. They loved poetry and ornate costumes and were one of the most tolerant of societies of the time, allowing conquered nations to continue their customs, costumes and languages. We have cultures like Greece and Parthia to thank for a myriad of useful things, from safety-pins to trigonometry, from parasols to the alphabet. They even knew that the Earth went around the sun! But it wasn’t just the east that was civilised: the Vandals were very keen on poetry, the Goths liked intricate gold jewellery, the Gauls even allowed equal rights for men and women. So much for “civilised” Rome against the barbarians!

Image via Wikipedia

So What DID the Romans Do For Us?

Even the most revisionist historian has to give the Roman world quite a lot of credit, because despite not really being that different to the rest of the ancient world and certainly not being as great as they liked to think, they were pretty darn clever. We have enormous olive presses, some with beams the size of trees others using an ingenious screw technique, with channels and vats designed to strain off the unwanted material like amurca and seeds. They designed special carts which would not only cut corn but thresh it, separating the grain from the stalks, the original “combine harvester”. They turned food production into an industry on a monumental scale. Those not-so-useful aqueducts were also masterworks of engineering, carefully planned using gravity to draw water from the source to the city, where the channel would be separated and distributed by special water towers known as “castella”. Their roads too were admittedly far longer-lasting than their wooden Gaulish predecessors.

But what we really have to thank Rome for is helping the knowledge from cultures like Greece, Parthia and the Celtic tribes to spread. Under the empire, trade routes became not only better established but better protected, thanks to Rome’s formidable army, allowing new ideas, and indeed rather old ones, to spread from India to Britain and everywhere in between. We mustn’t forget the importance of the army, not only to the structure and society of the Roman world, but also to the spread of knowledge. Soldiers learnt to read, some even to write and they learnt how to build roads, aqueducts and other imperially-funded projects. The Romans may not have invented many of the things we give them credit for, and they might not have been the great civilising influence that we’re told about in school, but they were very good at letting certain ideas travel.

Want to learn more about the ancient world? Check out my “Bluffers Guides” to ancient history. More will be added soon.