How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (10 page)

Technology

The Romans have long been celebrated as engineers but not as inventors. As Samuel Lilley put it, “The Romans could do no more … than exploit … the techniques they had learned from the Greeks.… Perhaps the only important invention that the Romans gave the world was that of concrete—and its applications in building.”
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Moreover, the great Roman engineering achievements mainly involved the construction of monumental public works, something at which empires always excel. The Romans built huge arenas, constructed elevated aqueducts to bring water quite long distances to many cities, and are regularly praised for the elaborate network of roads that crisscrossed the empire. They even built a few sewers. But none of these constructions employed any principles or techniques not well known to the Greeks.
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“For example,” Lilley wrote, “to drain their mines in Spain and Portugal they used large and elaborate machinery based on the water-raising wheel and the screw of [the Greek] Archimedes, but drove them by slaves in treadmills instead of by animal or water power.”
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As for the Roman roads, nothing more was involved than being able to shape and lay paving stones. The undue admiration for the Roman road system originated with classicists who either never actually inspected one of the many surviving examples or were so lacking in practical experience that they failed to notice obvious shortcomings. The Roman roads were very narrow—usually less than ten feet wide
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—and in many places were far too steep for anything but foot traffic. In addition, the Romans often did not build bridges, relying on fords that could be crossed on foot but that frequently were too deep and steep for carts and wagons.
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These inadequacies existed because the sole purpose of Roman roads was to permit soldiers to march quickly from one part of the empire to another. But even the soldiers preferred to walk along the side of the roads whenever possible, and that’s where nearly all civilian travelers walked or led their beasts. Why? Because paving stones were hard on legs and feet when dry, and very slippery when wet.

In addition to a lack of technological innovations, the Romans made little or no use of some known technologies. For example, they were entirely familiar with water power but preferred to use slave labor to grind their flour or, as noted above, to pump out their mine shafts. As Lilley explained, “The supply of captured slaves was apparently inexhaustible. Slavery was a more convenient way than machinery of dealing
with heavy power problems. The wealthy Roman invested his capital in slaves, not machines.”
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Sports and Entertainment

Romans loved to watch and bet on chariot races, as did the Greeks. But the Romans departed from the Greeks in their other preferences for spectator sports. As dangerous as chariot races could be, the purpose was to win by coming in first, not to kill the other competitors. Not so with the other major Roman spectator sports. A few public entertainments involved wild animals killing one another. Many more involved wild animals killing men and women who had been sentenced to death for various offenses, including for being Christians. Besides being fed to wild animals, people were executed in the arenas in a variety of sadistic ways—flogging, burning, skinning, impaling, dismemberment, and even crucifixion.

Many exhibitions involved the torture and slaughter of prisoners taken in battle. In 306 Emperor Constantine celebrated his victory over intruders on the Rhine frontier by having two captured Germanic Frankish kings fed to wild beasts in the arena at Trier. In 383 Emperor Valentinian II had a group of captured Persian soldiers slaughtered in the Colosseum. This event prompted the leading Roman statesman Quintus Aurelius Symmachus (AD 345–402) to write a note of praise to the emperor:

A column of chained prisoners … led in procession and faces once so fierce now changed to pitiable pallor. A name which once was terrifying to us [is] now the object of our delight, and hands trained to wield outlandish weapons afraid to meet the equipment of gladiators. May you enjoy the laurels of victory often and easily.… Let our brave soldiers take [the barbarians] prisoner and the arena in the city finish them off.
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And, of course, slaves were always fair game to be killed in various ways. But anyone could become a victim—once, when the supply of condemned criminals to be killed by wild animals ran out, the Emperor Caligula ordered that the first several rows of spectators be thrown to the beasts, and so they were.
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And then there were the gladiators. Gladiators were trained in various forms of combat in special schools—great emphasis was placed on dying well. Most gladiators were slaves (often taken as prisoners of war),
although some Romans voluntarily entered their ranks. There even were some female gladiators—they fought not only other women but also male dwarves.
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Sometimes the women wore armor, but more often they fought bare-chested (to prove they were females).
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Nero sometimes forced wives of senators to battle in the arena. In AD 200 the Emperor Severus banned combat by women.

Matches of gladiators were not always to the death; a loser who still lived and who had performed well could be spared to fight again. But probably most gladiators died in their first match, since well-known veteran gladiators often were pitted against novices. Gladiators did not always fight in pairs—sometimes many gladiators engaged in “battles.” Julius Caesar once paid for a show involving 640 gladiators. He had wanted to employ more, but the Senate refused to allow it. In AD 108–109 the Emperor Trajan employed 10,000 gladiators and 11,000 wild animals in an entertainment lasting 123 days. Such entertainments continued until banned by Christian emperors in the fourth century.

Spectacles of death in the arena were so uniformly popular all across the empire that, in addition to the Colosseum at Rome (finished in 80 BC with a seating capacity of 50,000), the Romans built 251 amphitheaters spread all across the empire.
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Many of these could seat 20,000 or more, and even the smallest could seat about 7,000.
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Keep in mind that as of AD 100 only thirty-one cities in the empire had populations of more than 30,000.
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Hence most arenas drew their spectators from villages, rural estates, and army camps.

To put the whole matter in perspective, it is credibly estimated that at least 200,000 people died in the Colosseum.
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It seems quite conservative to estimate that an average of at least 10,000 would have died in each of the other 251 amphitheaters, or another 2.5 million. All of this for amusement! But, as Edith Hamilton pointed out, the “brutal, bloody Roman games had nothing to do with the spirit of play. They were fathered by the Orient, not by Greece.”
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The Roman Army

In early days the Romans fought like Greeks, as did many of the other city-states in Italy. Like the Greeks, the Roman army consisted of citizen-soldiers who formed into phalanxes for battle, the front line
consisting of the sons of the wealthiest families. Unfortunately, after having subdued the other Latin and Greek city-states in Italy, Rome’s remaining enemies were mostly hill tribes, very mobile fighters who used the difficult terrain to their advantage; often the cumbersome phalanxes were unable to close with them to fight it out. Worse yet, in 387 BC the Gauls outmaneuvered the Roman phalanxes and sacked Rome. Subsequently, the Roman army was redesigned.
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Every Roman soldier still served a six-year tour of duty and was chosen by lot from an elite group of citizens who owned property and supplied their own equipment. But to increase maneuverability, the army reduced the amount of armor and made the shields smaller. The depth of the formation was reduced to three lines. The first line was the
hastati
, troopers in their first or second year of service, armed with a javelin and a sword. As they closed with the enemy, the
hastati
hurled the javelins and then fought with their swords. The second line, the
principes
, consisted of more experienced troops in their third through fifth years of service, more heavily armed and armored. If the
hastati
did not carry the day, they withdrew behind the ferocious, well-armored
principes
. The
triarii
were in their final year of service and were as heavily armored as the troops in the old phalanxes. They were armed with the long pikes of the phalanx troopers and formed a last line of defense behind which the
hastati
and
principes
could retreat if the battle went badly.

This is how things stood until Gaius Marius (157–86 BC) became consul. In response to a catastrophic defeat of Roman forces by Germanic tribes at Noreia on the Danube in 112 BC, Marius reorganized the Roman army. First, he dispensed with the three distinctive battle lines. Henceforth all soldiers carried the same arms and wore the same armor. Now “all available manpower could be brought into direct action,” as Arther Ferrill observed in
The Fall of the Roman Empire
. “There was no wastage at the rear of a deep formation.… Roman soldiers were not expected to fight to the death before being replaced by men from the rear. There was a regular rotation of fighting waves.”
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The new basic Roman military unit was the legion, consisting of six thousand soldiers divided into ten cohorts, each of which consisted of six centuries.

But by far the most significant Marian “reform” was to change who could join and for how long. Gone were the elite citizen-soldiers serving for six years. Now anyone could join, even the poor and non-Romans. In addition, volunteers were encouraged to make long-term enlistments by
being promised a comfortable retirement. The professional Roman army was born. Subsequently, the primary tactical advantage of the Romans involved training and “ferocious” discipline. Their arms were no different from those of their “barbarian” enemies—their shields had been copied from the Celts. But they were well trained to stand firm in their ranks and not to swing their swords but to make short, stabbing thrusts against opponents. As it had for the Greeks, this gave them a great advantage when fighting at close quarters. The legionnaires were also able to respond as whole units to appropriate bugle calls.
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Unlike the Greek Ten Thousand, however, the Roman army was not invincible—it suffered many horrific defeats. As mentioned, the most famous occurred at Cannae in 216 BC, when the Carthaginian forces under Hannibal outmaneuvered a much larger Roman force and then wiped out about fifty thousand Romans. The battle lost at Noreia on the Danube in 112 BC, which led to Marius’s reforms of the army, cost the Romans as many as eighty thousand soldiers killed along with tens of thousands of camp followers. In AD 9 three legions were slaughtered by Germanic tribes at Teutoburg Forest. In AD 378 the Romans were routed by Goths in the Battle of Adrianople and lost about twenty-five thousand men. There were many other somewhat less costly defeats. The Romans were able to absorb such losses because the empire was huge, having a population of about sixty million. They maintained about three hundred thousand legionnaires in the first century and up to about six hundred thousand by the middle of the third century.
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This was the Roman army that sustained a great empire for five centuries. Its primary drawback was that, being a long-service professional force, the troops tended to give their loyalty to their generals rather than to Rome. This led to chronic political instability as the legions overthrew emperors and installed new ones on a regular basis. And as will be seen, later changes would erode the effectiveness of the legions.

The Rise of Christianity

In terms of the journey to modernity, the Christianization of the empire was the most beneficial aspect of the Roman era. I have told this story at great length in previous books.
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Here a sketch will be sufficient.

In the aftermath of the crucifixion, probably fewer than two hundred
people believed that Jesus was the Son of God (Acts 1:15). Even so, within a year or two (by about AD 35) there probably was a tiny congregation in the city of Rome. No doubt it was formed by the migration of a few believers from Palestine. Once established in the city, this new movement grew rapidly through conversions. By the time the Apostle Paul wrote to the Romans (about AD 57), there were “at least seven house churches in Rome.”
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Moreover, Christianity probably had already penetrated the Roman aristocracy.
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Indeed, recent historians have refuted the traditional belief that early Christianity was based on poor people and slaves; they now accept that, as with most new religious movements, its primary appeal was to persons of privilege.
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In addition, most early Christians were urbanites, as reflected in the fact that
pagan
is an unflattering term for a rural person—the equivalent of
rube
or
country hick
. The religious usage arose because eventually the cities were so Christianized that most believers in the old gods lived in rural areas.

From quite early times, Romans persecuted Christians. In the summer of 64 the Emperor Nero sometimes lit his garden at night by setting fire to a few fully conscious Christians who had been covered with wax and then impaled high on poles forced up their rectums. He also dispatched a few Christians to the Colosseum to be eaten by wild animals and had others crucified. But such attacks on Christians were scattered and episodic until 249, when the Emperor Decius initiated an empire-wide persecution against Christians for refusing to make a one-time sacrifice to the Roman gods—an act he demanded of everyone in the empire in hopes of getting the old gods to smile on Rome once again. As a result, many Christian bishops were searched out and executed, as were other prominent Christians. But the traditional Roman gods seem not to have been impressed: when Decius led his army to turn back an invasion by Goths, he was killed and his legions were annihilated.