The fascinating thing about the Roman world is that they did so many thing so well, and that those things were done by a very small number of smart people. Rome

The fascinating thing about the Roman world is that they did so many thing so well, and that those things were done by a very small number of smart people. Rome over time produced a surprisingly large number of those people. I suspect one main reason is they had documentation. As an example, one of my favorites is reading the water system survey this guy did when he got stuck with the job: http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Frontinus/De_Aquis/text*.html http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Frontinus/... I mean, that's fucking good documentation. Sure it took 400 years before someone wrote it down, but he was also reading through existing docs for a lot of this.