OU on the BBC: What The Ancients Did For Us - The Romans

Hi Vasari,

Who can say why the Romans didn't develop moveable type, along with many other inventions that would have been, on hindsight tremendously useful. As you say some form of printing press would have been an asset to the imperial aministration, but that is the nature of invention. Perhaps future generations will look back with incredulity and wonder why we languished so long on our planet before inventing c+ travel, or put up with disease and war and all our planet's other woes. I hope so.

On your specific point we know disappointingly little about the precise mechanics of municipal and even imperial administration in the Roman world. Inscriptions survive, along with the correspondence between emperors like Trajan and consular or proconsular officials like Pliny. We also have records of laws that show how legislation promulgated from the imperial court came to be known in the cities of the empire. The more detailed mechanics are more inscrutable however. Enigmatic finds of box hinges in the context of administrative buidlings may suggest that paper documents played an important part and letters were the cement of many distributed friendship/economic/political associations. However, paper doesn't survive well so we will always underestimate the importance of hand written documents and so underestimate the need for a technical solution to their reproduction and distribution. We know that 'books' were a highly sought after and valuable commodity to the literate elite, but don't forget that the Roman society was an overwhelmingly illiterate one.

In addition to this reading was not the private silent activity that we know today. Most public and even private documents would have been read allowed and/or committed to memory. If you wanted a lasting record of a statement, cut it into stone.

Another way of approaching the question is to look at the nature of invention itself. Someting like the printing press, like the combine harvester and almost any complex tehnology is the result of many cumulative discoveries and theorietical breakthroughs. Whether something gets invented or not is therefore likely to depend upon the priorities that a society identifies as only several concerted small steps in a particular direction will achieve the end result, an end result that will doubtless prove to be no kind of end at all but just another step towards something else.

I think I need someone to say something about the cultural, political and social circumstances of the printing press' invention here, but I suspect that, in Europe at least, it took place in the context of an increasingly literate society where the cultural significance of the bible and other religious texts, combining with the importance of these ideas to nationhood, politics and personal salvation had something to do with it. The Romans simply didn't prioritise those activities and developments that would have led to the printing press.

Finally it is perhaps significant to mention that the Romans never developed a sophisticated sytem of patents that would encourage invention generally. The significance of this could be overplayed, but I am ineterested to hear what other people think

On tonight's programme, Adam Hart Davis demonstrated very well how a Roman road was constructed.

One question that struck me was: was the demonstration model full scale? The road looked very narrow to me. It would have been difficult for wheeled vehicles to pass. I wouldn't have liked to have been travelling the road and meeting a Roman legion marching the opposite way!

Having said that, the example of an actual Roman road shown didn't look much wider.

Can anyone tell me thw width of a typical Roman road? Did widths vary according to the importance of the road, much as today?