What Did the Romans Ever Do for Us?

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.