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They’re not. The Romans built a huge amount and much of their artistic architectural works remaining today were purposely preserved, even if reused for some alt

They’re not. The Romans built a huge amount and much of their artistic architectural works remaining today were purposely preserved, even if reused for some alternative purpose. Yes, there are some construction techniques they used that contributed to better survival rates than some other structure types. But mostly we’ve ended up with what was lucky enough to survive. Replay the historical tape again and we might be surprised by what didn’t survive war, fires, other natural disasters on the second go round.

cblconfederate 5y ago
> for the same reasons we preserve Victorian era buildings. Not really, christians destroyed a huge amount and ruthlessly, and tons of marble was 'repurposed'. The best chance of a building to survive was being used as a church
- atdrummond 5y ago
  I suppose I just don’t find that substantially different than the National Trust repurposing say Ickworth into a hotel. I understand that contemporary society places a higher value on a certain type of “accurate” preservation than many societies that came before but if people had truly wanted historical Roman buildings gone, they would be.
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    tons of pagan roman and greek statues were destroyed. what's left today is only a tiny amount
    - atdrummond 5y ago
      I agree? My original reply’s point was we have a very small minority of what the empire constructed. And much of that is because it was purposely preserved, if for alternative reasons.
    - pmontra 5y ago
      And basically all of them lost their paint. What we admire is only the shape of what the artists created, not the full creation. https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/gods-in-color-ancient-world-polychromy/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/gods-in-color-ancient-...
      - ciphol 5y ago
        Those garish colors probably aren't the real colors either. The researchers found one speck of paint and assumed the whole surface was the same color, when in reality the paint probably had complex gradations of color, like any normal painting. There is no need to assume the painting was less sophisticated than the sculpture underneath it.
- Pigalowda 5y ago
  I recently found out about this sad column repurposed in 608 AD as an honor to the Eastern Roman Emperor, Phocas. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Column_of_Phocas https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Column_of_Phocas The city had been sacked multiple times at that point and I suppose it was the best they could do.
  - atdrummond 5y ago
    What’s crazy there is that by the mid-1800s, sketches would only show a portion of the column due to the rise in ground level over the intermediate period.
- sandgiant 5y ago
  Destroying symbols of a previous rule was (is) commons practice. Constantine realized that some building and monuments were worth preserving and repurposed them as "Christian", thereby ensuring their preservation for hundreds, or even a thousand of years.
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    The ruler did not change - the motive was religious
- cpursley 5y ago
  Yep, that was the first thing I noticed after visiting churches in Rome. All the columns were random.
peoplefromibiza 5y ago
Nope. Romans invented concrete, and it was so good that still today the average concrete can't compete with it (its resistance to cracks is one example) Rewind history and roman buildings would still be there. They are thought to be one of the few things that would survive human extinction. The only thing that would outlast them are Giza Pyramids. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete
- atdrummond 5y ago
  I don’t have the energy to revisit the arguments about Roman concrete that come up every time it is mentioned on HN. Needless to say, the notion that their “superior” method was “forgotten” is a massive oversimplification of what actually happened. Another comment made my point better than I did - which was that Roman buildings that remained standing did so because they were useful for some purpose, often an alternative one (such as a church). It speaks to their value specifically as architecture and is mostly orthogonal to their construction techniques. There are plenty of old buildings (such as Hōryū-ji, Ruwanweli Maha Seya, Mousa Broch, etc) that don’t use any kind of magical construction techniques but have stuck around because of their value to the surrounding society and active efforts at preservation and/or repurposing.
  - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
    > which was that Roman buildings that remained standing did so because they were useful for some purpose, that's a fallacy. A lot of buildings were useful back then, it wasn't easy to build them nor cheap. But most of them collapsed, because they weren't strong enough. You get roman buildings everywhere in Europe and Northern Africa, a lot of civilizations lived there in the past 40 centuries and their remains are scarce at best. It is like saying that Amazon beat many other startups of its times because they got lucky, it's simply because their execution was better than the competition.
    - qwytw 5y ago
      There are very few Roman buildings that had survived intact. Besides the theaters and aqueducts there are basically none which were not later turned into churches. While Roman buildings might have been stronger than those built by the preceding civilizations (then again in the case of Europe (outside of Greece) and Northern Africa Roman there was very little competition, who else built massive coliseums at the the time?) most ancient buildings did not just simply collapse due to age but were destroyed by people who wanted to reuse their building material.
JSavageOne 5y ago
You respond to an article detailing the superior durability of Roman concrete with "they just chose to preserve these buildings" and "they just got lucky", cite no sources, and this is the top comment on this thread? Seems HN quality has gone downhill since what I last remember.
- atdrummond 5y ago
  Perhaps because there are enough people here who have been around for the dozens of comment threads we’ve had about the Roman concrete meme and how the notion that it is A. superior and B. a recipe completely lost to time is very much an extreme simplification of the situation. Rather than spend my effort fighting a battle others have fought, here is an older HN thread with good commentary on the topic and links to countless previous discussions as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22580920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22580920
  - arcticfox 5y ago
    I thought I'd find a lot of references to it not being (A) superior in that thread, but I actually didn't find much of anything supporting your point. Maybe it's deeper in the dang linked threads but I'm not that motivated to find evidence supporting you.
    - atdrummond 5y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27282927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27282927 Here’s a thread from 6 months ago where there is significant discussion about why concrete is used the way it is today. Those parameters/considerations differ from those that the Romans would have faced. And, again, we only have the best examples of Roman cement today available for analysis versus the very wide range of construction quality that occurs today. The very article linked also explains some of the limitations/ways in which Roman cement isn’t ideal/superior - for one, the massively longer curing time.

cblconfederate 5y ago

> for the same reasons we preserve Victorian era buildings. Not really, christians destroyed a huge amount and ruthlessly, and tons of marble was 'repurposed'. The best chance of a building to survive was being used as a church

atdrummond 5y ago
I suppose I just don’t find that substantially different than the National Trust repurposing say Ickworth into a hotel. I understand that contemporary society places a higher value on a certain type of “accurate” preservation than many societies that came before but if people had truly wanted historical Roman buildings gone, they would be.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  tons of pagan roman and greek statues were destroyed. what's left today is only a tiny amount
  - atdrummond 5y ago
    I agree? My original reply’s point was we have a very small minority of what the empire constructed. And much of that is because it was purposely preserved, if for alternative reasons.
  - pmontra 5y ago
    And basically all of them lost their paint. What we admire is only the shape of what the artists created, not the full creation. https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/gods-in-color-ancient-world-polychromy/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/gods-in-color-ancient-...
    - ciphol 5y ago
      Those garish colors probably aren't the real colors either. The researchers found one speck of paint and assumed the whole surface was the same color, when in reality the paint probably had complex gradations of color, like any normal painting. There is no need to assume the painting was less sophisticated than the sculpture underneath it.
Pigalowda 5y ago
I recently found out about this sad column repurposed in 608 AD as an honor to the Eastern Roman Emperor, Phocas. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Column_of_Phocas https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Column_of_Phocas The city had been sacked multiple times at that point and I suppose it was the best they could do.
- atdrummond 5y ago
  What’s crazy there is that by the mid-1800s, sketches would only show a portion of the column due to the rise in ground level over the intermediate period.
sandgiant 5y ago
Destroying symbols of a previous rule was (is) commons practice. Constantine realized that some building and monuments were worth preserving and repurposed them as "Christian", thereby ensuring their preservation for hundreds, or even a thousand of years.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  The ruler did not change - the motive was religious
cpursley 5y ago
Yep, that was the first thing I noticed after visiting churches in Rome. All the columns were random.

peoplefromibiza 5y ago

Nope. Romans invented concrete, and it was so good that still today the average concrete can't compete with it (its resistance to cracks is one example) Rewind history and roman buildings would still be there. They are thought to be one of the few things that would survive human extinction. The only thing that would outlast them are Giza Pyramids. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete

atdrummond 5y ago
I don’t have the energy to revisit the arguments about Roman concrete that come up every time it is mentioned on HN. Needless to say, the notion that their “superior” method was “forgotten” is a massive oversimplification of what actually happened. Another comment made my point better than I did - which was that Roman buildings that remained standing did so because they were useful for some purpose, often an alternative one (such as a church). It speaks to their value specifically as architecture and is mostly orthogonal to their construction techniques. There are plenty of old buildings (such as Hōryū-ji, Ruwanweli Maha Seya, Mousa Broch, etc) that don’t use any kind of magical construction techniques but have stuck around because of their value to the surrounding society and active efforts at preservation and/or repurposing.
- peoplefromibiza 5y ago
  > which was that Roman buildings that remained standing did so because they were useful for some purpose, that's a fallacy. A lot of buildings were useful back then, it wasn't easy to build them nor cheap. But most of them collapsed, because they weren't strong enough. You get roman buildings everywhere in Europe and Northern Africa, a lot of civilizations lived there in the past 40 centuries and their remains are scarce at best. It is like saying that Amazon beat many other startups of its times because they got lucky, it's simply because their execution was better than the competition.
  - qwytw 5y ago
    There are very few Roman buildings that had survived intact. Besides the theaters and aqueducts there are basically none which were not later turned into churches. While Roman buildings might have been stronger than those built by the preceding civilizations (then again in the case of Europe (outside of Greece) and Northern Africa Roman there was very little competition, who else built massive coliseums at the the time?) most ancient buildings did not just simply collapse due to age but were destroyed by people who wanted to reuse their building material.

JSavageOne 5y ago

You respond to an article detailing the superior durability of Roman concrete with "they just chose to preserve these buildings" and "they just got lucky", cite no sources, and this is the top comment on this thread? Seems HN quality has gone downhill since what I last remember.

atdrummond 5y ago
Perhaps because there are enough people here who have been around for the dozens of comment threads we’ve had about the Roman concrete meme and how the notion that it is A. superior and B. a recipe completely lost to time is very much an extreme simplification of the situation. Rather than spend my effort fighting a battle others have fought, here is an older HN thread with good commentary on the topic and links to countless previous discussions as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22580920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22580920
- arcticfox 5y ago
  I thought I'd find a lot of references to it not being (A) superior in that thread, but I actually didn't find much of anything supporting your point. Maybe it's deeper in the dang linked threads but I'm not that motivated to find evidence supporting you.
  - atdrummond 5y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27282927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27282927 Here’s a thread from 6 months ago where there is significant discussion about why concrete is used the way it is today. Those parameters/considerations differ from those that the Romans would have faced. And, again, we only have the best examples of Roman cement today available for analysis versus the very wide range of construction quality that occurs today. The very article linked also explains some of the limitations/ways in which Roman cement isn’t ideal/superior - for one, the massively longer curing time.