8 ms·

Ancient Rome's failed building projects

132 points by diodorus 3y ago

Mphetbug 3y ago
[dead]
visarga 3y ago
Never ceases to amaze me how advanced Romans were for their time.
- inglor_cz 3y ago
  Especially considering that they had no engines to speak of. Everything on dry land was moved around by human or animal muscles. All the stones, pillars and concrete had to be lifted manually.
  - delichon 3y ago
    A large fraction of that workforce was enslaved, and it's not accidental that the terminology has descended into engine jargon, like master & slave cylinders, clocks, drives, etc. We have replaced the fleshy engines of the ancients with inorganic ones to the general benefit. I hope that's a good portent for the replacement of us fleshy knowledge engines by AI.
    - lisper 3y ago
      Difference being that knowledge work can actually be fun.
      - EarthLaunch 3y ago
        Physical work can be fun too! Neither as much when you're a slave of course.
        wolverine876 3y ago
        It's fun as a hobby. It may be fun to work with your hands. I haven't heard people who do heavy labor their whole lives talk about it as fun. It's brutal to do it every day for decades, causes a lot of pain and injury, and just imagine getting out of bed for it, again, when you're 50.
      - whynotminot 3y ago
        To me the difference seems to come in with “mass industrialization” or de-personalization. I’m growing my own backyard vegetables? Challenging but rewarding. I’m part of massive factory farming? Less enthused. I think this can be generalized across a lot of industries, and I think it boils down to our human need to feel like we’re more than just a small cog.
        graphe 3y ago
        Why isn't optimizing for factory farming not fun? You might mean the loss of autonomy.
        xyzzy123 3y ago
        I think Marxists call it "alienation of labour", quite a lot is written about this. Loss of autonomy is definitely a factor, but also people can get disconnected from the output leading to a loss of meaning in the actual work. At industrial scales vegetables are an intermediate step in a production / distribution chain where the desired output is actually dollars. If dumping or mulching them results in more dollars, so be it. If it tastes worse but transports better and you get more dollars, worse tasting it is. Etc etc. You could say that the optimisation process itself results in a loss of autonomy since market structure, competition and regulation dictate what you have to do to a large extent. "Don't hate the player, hate the game...". I think knowledge work can go the same way.
        graphe 3y ago
        Theory of alienation in Marxism usually refers to the idea that social hierarchies exist because they're tied to your work. Optimization isn't strictly just production based, it can be carbon capture. Then you get to Marx's other theory: the commodity fetishiation. It's not all doom, you can fetishize some crops by making them organic, carbon negative, low water, etc. All of knowledge work is very alienating.
    - graemep 3y ago
      The first part if true: Romans did depend on slavery, as did most ancient societies. I am less convinced that engine jargon is derived from that. Where the terminology is master and slave specifically, yes, but not necessarily in slave societies. Where the terminology is master and something other than slave, I do not think so. Slave is pretty unambiguous. Master less so. To a middle aged British bloke like myself the strongest association of master that I grew up with was "male school teacher". Master craftsman is also a significant association.
      - mike_hock 3y ago
        He specifically said "master & slave." IDE master-slave drives are also "derived from slavery" simply because that's what "slave" means, even though the analogy doesn't make much sense (the master drive doesn't control the slave drive and isn't superior to it).
      - allan_s 3y ago
        Exactly master come from the latin magister which mean the school teacher, the slave owner in latin is dominus (dominion , dominate etc.)
    - jml7c5 3y ago
      This is a slight digression, but I strongly suspect that master/slave in technical contexts originated as a pun. It was normal practice to refer to a canonical or primary object as the "master _____", with the same meaning as "main". My guess is that some point someone wanted to refer to a subordinate object, noted that "master" can also mean "owner of a slave", and the obvious pun fit well enough to stick.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  > Never ceases to amaze me how advanced Romans were for their time. What they did is impressive, but how do we define the norm for their time? Every time has some doing better, some doing worse. Also I wonder how much we compare the Romans to what came after them in Europe, the long Middle Ages when technology went backward. If technology kept moving forward at the Classical pace (whatever that is), would we be as impressed with the Romans?
  - Gare 3y ago
    > Also I wonder how much we compare the Romans to what came after them in Europe, the long Middle Ages when technology went backward. Technology mostly didn't go backward, societal organization did. Rome was nowhere near industrial revolution. https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
    - wolverine876 3y ago
      > Rome was nowhere near industrial revolution. I'm not sure how that impacts the question at hand, whether technology went backward in the Middle Ages. > Technology mostly didn't go backward, societal organization did. In Middle Ages Europe people did not develop or implement technology, or even employ existing Roman technology, at nearly the level of the Romans. Who built new aquaducts, for example? They developed, implemented, and used worse technology than the Romans often did; that's what I mean by 'it went backward'.
      - qwytw 3y ago
        > In Middle Ages Europe people did not develop or implement technology, or even employ existing Roman technology, at nearly the level of the Romans Anything to substantiate this claim? Metallurgy and agriculture were more advanced, watermills much more widespread, windmills appeared by the 12th, overall medieval Europe was generally more industrialized than Ancient Rome and relied less on manual human labour. Of course you're right about urban infrastructure, it had declined significantly, on the other hand there weren't as many cities and those that existed had relatively low populations outside of Constantinople and some Muslim cities (Rome itself was only able to sustain such a high population due to massive wealth transfers from the provinces without providing that much in return).
- JoeAltmaier 3y ago
  Yet they rejected simple advances such as horse collars, or so the legend goes. So capable in some arenas; so incompetent in others.
  - teruakohatu 3y ago
    There is a story/myth whose earliest retelling is from Petronius about that a gold or metal worker who devised a wondrous new metal and after confirming he was the only one who knew its secret was put to death to avoid upsetting the economy. It has been thought this may have been an aluminium alloy.
    - m4rtink 3y ago
      That seems unlikely - unless it somehow avoided making pure aluminium first, its notoriously difficult (and quite dirty) even by modern standards to rerine aluminium, due to how strong bond aluminium compounds form (which is alsow what protects aluminium from the elements once you have it - a quickly forming thin layer of aluminium oxide).
- adastra22 3y ago
  Slaves. They had an Industrial Revolution, albeit one built on the backs of "biorobots." A large, double-digit percentage of the Roman population were slaves. If you exclude farmers (who were slaves to the land in a different sense), the vast majority of Romans were slaves. If you went to a market in Rome or Alexandria, you'd see slaves of various households buying groceries from enslaved shop vendors working for the landlord shop owner. Most of the people walking on the street were slaves. Now imagine I got up to give a TED talk and told you my company perfected the humanoid robot, to such an extent that they were cheap to buy, perfectly able to understand and carry out instructions, self-replicating, needed only a little food and water as input, and able to develop highly toned skills? Can you imagine the productivity boost our society would experience? Rome had that. Until Christianization slowly eradicated the institution of slavery, and the transition to serfdom. It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution once again gave us (mechanical) slaves that progress took off.
  - iamthemonster 3y ago
    Wage slaves are an upgrade on slaves because they have reduced rates of escape and revolt.
    - Jensson 3y ago
      Wage slaves revolt by starting companies themselves. That is productive and helps society unlike violent revolutions,
      - guappa 3y ago
        How out of touch must you be to believe that a wage slave can start a company? With which initial capital?
  - fragmede 3y ago
    Those biorobots are limited to what a human is able to do. A Roman slave can only lift as much as the strongest human. A forklift can lift far greater weights, a printing press can make far more copies than an army of scribes could produce. their economic conditions and culture had them stuck in a local maxima, but what a maxima it was. What are we currently stuck in a local maxima because we're hamstrung by economic conditions and our culture? housing and zoning seems to be a big one.
- Razengan 3y ago
  Remember that the Egyptian pyramids were already around 2000 years old by the time of the Romans, as old to them as the Romans are to us now, and not surpassed for another 1000 years or so.
  - ido 3y ago
    The pyramids were famously older to Cleopatra than Cleopatra is to us.
- matwood 3y ago
  Yeah. Cities like Pompeii and Herculeum are amazing to see. Then there are structures like this that carried water over 50km. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pont_du_Gard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pont_du_Gard
  - intrasight 3y ago
    Pompeii was amazing and (as an engineer) humbling. The roads. Build to last hundreds of years. And in a city old enough that they were indeed rebuilt. The plumbing. Steam baths. Clay sewer pipes. Lead supply pipes. Basically the tech we had until the 20th century. I'm looking forward to returning in September.
    - seer 3y ago
      I liked Herculanum a lot more - since its excavated using modern techniques, its very well preserved, with multi story buildings, interior spaces with preserved decoration. I was particularly enchanted with the baths / gymnasium / fastfood joint. Could easily imagine living in that place quite satisfactory.
      - southernplaces7 3y ago
        Until of course you get sick with smallpox, or cholera, or just a simple staph infection through a small cut on your finger, which then spreads hellishly with no medical recourse except maybe amputation. I'm being a bit tongue in cheek about the obvious that you already surely would be aware of, but one underlying, implicit tendency for many people who marvel at the sophistication of Rome and the lives of its famous figures is to subconsciously forget the grime and misery that existed between these shining examples. This was the case on a scale that today isn't seen even in the world's poorest countries. For the vast majority of people living even in that most advanced and wealthy of ancient civilizations, mortality, disability and disease rates from all sorts of causes would have made much of life very dangerous and sometimes suddenly brutal unless you were purely lucky or particularly careful -but even then quite lucky along the way. From failing eyesight to hemorrhoids to simple but painful dental problems, the means for dealing with these sorts of pervasive aspects of the human condition would have been either nonexistent or themselves very unpleasant. I can't remember its name for now, but I once read an excellent book that used reams of old diary entries to describe the miseries, travails and frequent health problems of the regular inhabitants of London in the 18th century. It was positively grim and in some cases downright nightmarish. This, mind you, at a time when sanitation and medicine were at least starting to move forward again and were placing humanity in the west right at the early stages of the population explosion that civilization is finally winding down today, apparently. I can only imagine that in ancient Rome it was no better. Another macabre historical detail I remember once reading was that reason for why names like Septimus, Octavius, Decimus and so forth were so common in ancient Rome stemmed from many parents naming their 7ths, 8th, tenth and etc kids just by the numerical order of their arrival to save too much sentimental thought on a baby that was more likely than not going to die long before it matured. A case of grimness so ingrained to the expectations of life that a callous acceptance is taken for granted.
lifeisstillgood 3y ago
>>> An architect, when he has received the commission for some public work, promises in advance what the cost is to be. After 2,000 years surely we should have found a more realistic means of judging projects and success than the upfront guesstimate …
- duxup 3y ago
  Human nature is hard to avoid.
- samus 3y ago
  In the face of scope creep, changing requirements, unforeseeable external factors, and purely human factors (like corruption, incompetence, neglect, internal rivalries, etc.), projects always faced huge risks. Projects nowadays are vastly bigger in scope (perhaps unnecessarily so), but the usual mechanisms to control the inefficiencies of bureaucracies are not easy to scale up.
- mulmen 3y ago
  How are you sure there is a better method than the educated guess? We have sophisticated methods of guessing and risk mitigation but I don’t believe there’s a fundamentally different approach.
- arccy 3y ago
  instead we have cost plus contracts
- Arrath 3y ago
  Ah, the good old engineer estimate.
seagreen 3y ago
Link to the mentioned section of De Architectura by Vitruvius: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20239/20239-h/20239-h.htm#Page_281 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20239/20239-h/20239-h.htm#Pa...
- sema4hacker 3y ago
  I only read the first couple of paragraphs, but they imply that the architect (designer) and engineer (builder) were one and the same. Was that the case?
Simon_ORourke 3y ago
The article itself is a bit light on actual specifics, but perhaps the ancient literature is less inclined to write about some project out in the provinces that didn't quite come off as planned, versus some of the eye-watering stuff they actually accomplished. I've not read Suetonius for a good 20 years or more, but I vaguely remember some piece where he recounts about having the engineering saavy to flood the amphitheatre in Rome to host mock naval battles. Well mock battles in the sense that the poor guys actually fighting and dying are only doing "pretend" battles, but you know what I mean.
- golergka 3y ago
  A lot of ancient writers didn't shy away from writing awful things about emperors. You could say that it was for propaganda purposes of their successors, but regardless of their motives, why wouldn't they write about their construction failures as well?
  - boomboomsubban 3y ago
    Attempting a public works project could still be seen as a positive thing? "Nero at least tried to build new baths, what has Domitian ever done for us?"
    - a_gnostic 3y ago
      ROMANI ITE DOMVM!
      - npsomaratna 3y ago
        ROMANES EUNT DOMUS!
  - bimguy 3y ago
    Remember, we aren't talking about modern society with access to a ton of recording essentials, we are talking about a very select few educated individuals (given the overall population) that were probably preoccupied writing much more important things then a building project failure.
willmadden 3y ago
I think this article misses the point. First of all, it's written for entry-level readers, or advanced idiots. Second, the focus should be on lost technology and the wisdom of building past 100 years of life expectency with durable goods, and how we could leverage the best parts of this approach where it makes sense (sans climate change idiocracy).
nelox 3y ago
If only the Romans had actually completed the Colosseum. It truly was a wonderful concept. Sadly it seems the engineering challenges were never the issue, only a lack of political will and shortsightedness ultimately led to the failure of the project.
- joshmarinacci 3y ago
  What are you talking about. It was finished and used until an earthquake damaged it.
mp05 3y ago
Think how much more the Romans would have accomplished with a great scrummaster versed in agile project management ceremonies and jargon.
- froh 3y ago
  grreat "thanks". now how do I get the Cleopatra (1963) images back out of my head when our high priests conduct their next SaFE rituals? https://youtu.be/vB5Wv8IHVf0?si=9lG7vcxJVMWfVrgn https://youtu.be/vB5Wv8IHVf0?si=9lG7vcxJVMWfVrgn
- doctor_eval 3y ago
  It could have been epic!
1-6 3y ago
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hansonpeter 3y ago
[dead]
wwwpatdelcom 3y ago
First off, I'm glad we all got our daily thought about the Roman Empire in today. Secondly, this author is much more qualified than me to either agree or refute this; I believe we need to be incredibly skeptical when reading about Roman Engineering failures. I wrote and researched about this, using some of Vitruvius' writings last year: https://patdel.substack.com/p/why-didnt-ancient-rome-have-a-space https://patdel.substack.com/p/why-didnt-ancient-rome-have-a-.... * Rome was incredibly paternalistic, so pointing out the failures of others without appropriate aristocratic station might not have been quite the exercise in pure engineering that we might consider engineering to be today, even though Rome obviously made great engineering accomplishments and one might think that celebrated Roman architects could not be writing anything other than in a strictly professional manner. I think that when we read Vitruvius through a modern lens, we might think, "Oh this dude was a real professional, he makes good points," when in reality I think, at least in the example I point out in my blog post, I think he might have been using an example of failure to say, "See? Only royals, aristocrats and rich people should even try to innovate." Granted, there wasn't liability insurance for architectural or engineering failures as far as I am aware so this belief may have been prudent in terms of saving lives, but I think there was probably a primarily social-religious reasoning for it. The idea of the rich, hereditary classes, the father of the household, the ones in charge being the only ones, "allowed," to innovate was deeply held in Ancient Rome, much like in Confucianism and other agricultural societies that have formed through human history. "Don't rock the boat." I don't think it was until the 1500's or so that humanity started to collectively emerge out of that type of mentality as pre-industrialization and the scientific revolution began. Eventually the aristocrats (in Europe) saw non-royals being so successful at being industrialists, they wanted in on the game and removed laws that prevented them from engaging in capitalism. The author writes: > Its failure became a cautionary tale of an unrealistic project that sought to go beyond what nature allowed. Five decades later, the Roman senator and historian Tacitus claimed that evidence of this ‘futile ambition’ could still be seen in the rock faces near Avernus. Interestingly, Tacitus did not blame the vainglorious and weak-willed emperor alone, but also the architects who conceived the project and were judged to have ‘frittered away the resources of a Caesar’. I read that as the author saying that Tacitus was angling the engineering failure analysis in a political way, not a purely engineering post-failure-analysis way. E.g., the project might have even been a success but then Tacitus just lied about it, we don't know.
Arn_Thor 3y ago
“ However, Trajan still thought it important for such projects to go ahead if properly managed – the need for infrastructure and public buildings did not vanish just because previous efforts to construct them had been incompetently handled.” Something something HS2…
SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
I'll refer to the The Tunnel of Eupalinos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_of_Eupalinos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_of_Eupalinos Which is Ancient Greek, and did not fail, but did require remedial engineering afterwards to make it work. > Apparently, the subsidence at the spring lowered the level of the water after work had begun, leaving the tunnel too high. A separate channel had to be dug below the east half of the tunnel to carry the water itself.

132 points by diodorus 3y ago

Mphetbug 3y ago

[dead]

visarga 3y ago

Never ceases to amaze me how advanced Romans were for their time.

inglor_cz 3y ago
Especially considering that they had no engines to speak of. Everything on dry land was moved around by human or animal muscles. All the stones, pillars and concrete had to be lifted manually.
- delichon 3y ago
  A large fraction of that workforce was enslaved, and it's not accidental that the terminology has descended into engine jargon, like master & slave cylinders, clocks, drives, etc. We have replaced the fleshy engines of the ancients with inorganic ones to the general benefit. I hope that's a good portent for the replacement of us fleshy knowledge engines by AI.
  - lisper 3y ago
    Difference being that knowledge work can actually be fun.
    - EarthLaunch 3y ago
      Physical work can be fun too! Neither as much when you're a slave of course.
      - wolverine876 3y ago
        It's fun as a hobby. It may be fun to work with your hands. I haven't heard people who do heavy labor their whole lives talk about it as fun. It's brutal to do it every day for decades, causes a lot of pain and injury, and just imagine getting out of bed for it, again, when you're 50.
    - whynotminot 3y ago
      To me the difference seems to come in with “mass industrialization” or de-personalization. I’m growing my own backyard vegetables? Challenging but rewarding. I’m part of massive factory farming? Less enthused. I think this can be generalized across a lot of industries, and I think it boils down to our human need to feel like we’re more than just a small cog.
      - graphe 3y ago
        Why isn't optimizing for factory farming not fun? You might mean the loss of autonomy.
        xyzzy123 3y ago
        I think Marxists call it "alienation of labour", quite a lot is written about this. Loss of autonomy is definitely a factor, but also people can get disconnected from the output leading to a loss of meaning in the actual work. At industrial scales vegetables are an intermediate step in a production / distribution chain where the desired output is actually dollars. If dumping or mulching them results in more dollars, so be it. If it tastes worse but transports better and you get more dollars, worse tasting it is. Etc etc. You could say that the optimisation process itself results in a loss of autonomy since market structure, competition and regulation dictate what you have to do to a large extent. "Don't hate the player, hate the game...". I think knowledge work can go the same way.
        graphe 3y ago
        Theory of alienation in Marxism usually refers to the idea that social hierarchies exist because they're tied to your work. Optimization isn't strictly just production based, it can be carbon capture. Then you get to Marx's other theory: the commodity fetishiation. It's not all doom, you can fetishize some crops by making them organic, carbon negative, low water, etc. All of knowledge work is very alienating.
  - graemep 3y ago
    The first part if true: Romans did depend on slavery, as did most ancient societies. I am less convinced that engine jargon is derived from that. Where the terminology is master and slave specifically, yes, but not necessarily in slave societies. Where the terminology is master and something other than slave, I do not think so. Slave is pretty unambiguous. Master less so. To a middle aged British bloke like myself the strongest association of master that I grew up with was "male school teacher". Master craftsman is also a significant association.
    - mike_hock 3y ago
      He specifically said "master & slave." IDE master-slave drives are also "derived from slavery" simply because that's what "slave" means, even though the analogy doesn't make much sense (the master drive doesn't control the slave drive and isn't superior to it).
    - allan_s 3y ago
      Exactly master come from the latin magister which mean the school teacher, the slave owner in latin is dominus (dominion , dominate etc.)
  - jml7c5 3y ago
    This is a slight digression, but I strongly suspect that master/slave in technical contexts originated as a pun. It was normal practice to refer to a canonical or primary object as the "master _____", with the same meaning as "main". My guess is that some point someone wanted to refer to a subordinate object, noted that "master" can also mean "owner of a slave", and the obvious pun fit well enough to stick.
wolverine876 3y ago
> Never ceases to amaze me how advanced Romans were for their time. What they did is impressive, but how do we define the norm for their time? Every time has some doing better, some doing worse. Also I wonder how much we compare the Romans to what came after them in Europe, the long Middle Ages when technology went backward. If technology kept moving forward at the Classical pace (whatever that is), would we be as impressed with the Romans?
- Gare 3y ago
  > Also I wonder how much we compare the Romans to what came after them in Europe, the long Middle Ages when technology went backward. Technology mostly didn't go backward, societal organization did. Rome was nowhere near industrial revolution. https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    > Rome was nowhere near industrial revolution. I'm not sure how that impacts the question at hand, whether technology went backward in the Middle Ages. > Technology mostly didn't go backward, societal organization did. In Middle Ages Europe people did not develop or implement technology, or even employ existing Roman technology, at nearly the level of the Romans. Who built new aquaducts, for example? They developed, implemented, and used worse technology than the Romans often did; that's what I mean by 'it went backward'.
    - qwytw 3y ago
      > In Middle Ages Europe people did not develop or implement technology, or even employ existing Roman technology, at nearly the level of the Romans Anything to substantiate this claim? Metallurgy and agriculture were more advanced, watermills much more widespread, windmills appeared by the 12th, overall medieval Europe was generally more industrialized than Ancient Rome and relied less on manual human labour. Of course you're right about urban infrastructure, it had declined significantly, on the other hand there weren't as many cities and those that existed had relatively low populations outside of Constantinople and some Muslim cities (Rome itself was only able to sustain such a high population due to massive wealth transfers from the provinces without providing that much in return).
JoeAltmaier 3y ago
Yet they rejected simple advances such as horse collars, or so the legend goes. So capable in some arenas; so incompetent in others.
- teruakohatu 3y ago
  There is a story/myth whose earliest retelling is from Petronius about that a gold or metal worker who devised a wondrous new metal and after confirming he was the only one who knew its secret was put to death to avoid upsetting the economy. It has been thought this may have been an aluminium alloy.
  - m4rtink 3y ago
    That seems unlikely - unless it somehow avoided making pure aluminium first, its notoriously difficult (and quite dirty) even by modern standards to rerine aluminium, due to how strong bond aluminium compounds form (which is alsow what protects aluminium from the elements once you have it - a quickly forming thin layer of aluminium oxide).
adastra22 3y ago
Slaves. They had an Industrial Revolution, albeit one built on the backs of "biorobots." A large, double-digit percentage of the Roman population were slaves. If you exclude farmers (who were slaves to the land in a different sense), the vast majority of Romans were slaves. If you went to a market in Rome or Alexandria, you'd see slaves of various households buying groceries from enslaved shop vendors working for the landlord shop owner. Most of the people walking on the street were slaves. Now imagine I got up to give a TED talk and told you my company perfected the humanoid robot, to such an extent that they were cheap to buy, perfectly able to understand and carry out instructions, self-replicating, needed only a little food and water as input, and able to develop highly toned skills? Can you imagine the productivity boost our society would experience? Rome had that. Until Christianization slowly eradicated the institution of slavery, and the transition to serfdom. It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution once again gave us (mechanical) slaves that progress took off.
- iamthemonster 3y ago
  Wage slaves are an upgrade on slaves because they have reduced rates of escape and revolt.
  - Jensson 3y ago
    Wage slaves revolt by starting companies themselves. That is productive and helps society unlike violent revolutions,
    - guappa 3y ago
      How out of touch must you be to believe that a wage slave can start a company? With which initial capital?
- fragmede 3y ago
  Those biorobots are limited to what a human is able to do. A Roman slave can only lift as much as the strongest human. A forklift can lift far greater weights, a printing press can make far more copies than an army of scribes could produce. their economic conditions and culture had them stuck in a local maxima, but what a maxima it was. What are we currently stuck in a local maxima because we're hamstrung by economic conditions and our culture? housing and zoning seems to be a big one.
Razengan 3y ago
Remember that the Egyptian pyramids were already around 2000 years old by the time of the Romans, as old to them as the Romans are to us now, and not surpassed for another 1000 years or so.
- ido 3y ago
  The pyramids were famously older to Cleopatra than Cleopatra is to us.
matwood 3y ago
Yeah. Cities like Pompeii and Herculeum are amazing to see. Then there are structures like this that carried water over 50km. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pont_du_Gard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pont_du_Gard
- intrasight 3y ago
  Pompeii was amazing and (as an engineer) humbling. The roads. Build to last hundreds of years. And in a city old enough that they were indeed rebuilt. The plumbing. Steam baths. Clay sewer pipes. Lead supply pipes. Basically the tech we had until the 20th century. I'm looking forward to returning in September.
  - seer 3y ago
    I liked Herculanum a lot more - since its excavated using modern techniques, its very well preserved, with multi story buildings, interior spaces with preserved decoration. I was particularly enchanted with the baths / gymnasium / fastfood joint. Could easily imagine living in that place quite satisfactory.
    - southernplaces7 3y ago
      Until of course you get sick with smallpox, or cholera, or just a simple staph infection through a small cut on your finger, which then spreads hellishly with no medical recourse except maybe amputation. I'm being a bit tongue in cheek about the obvious that you already surely would be aware of, but one underlying, implicit tendency for many people who marvel at the sophistication of Rome and the lives of its famous figures is to subconsciously forget the grime and misery that existed between these shining examples. This was the case on a scale that today isn't seen even in the world's poorest countries. For the vast majority of people living even in that most advanced and wealthy of ancient civilizations, mortality, disability and disease rates from all sorts of causes would have made much of life very dangerous and sometimes suddenly brutal unless you were purely lucky or particularly careful -but even then quite lucky along the way. From failing eyesight to hemorrhoids to simple but painful dental problems, the means for dealing with these sorts of pervasive aspects of the human condition would have been either nonexistent or themselves very unpleasant. I can't remember its name for now, but I once read an excellent book that used reams of old diary entries to describe the miseries, travails and frequent health problems of the regular inhabitants of London in the 18th century. It was positively grim and in some cases downright nightmarish. This, mind you, at a time when sanitation and medicine were at least starting to move forward again and were placing humanity in the west right at the early stages of the population explosion that civilization is finally winding down today, apparently. I can only imagine that in ancient Rome it was no better. Another macabre historical detail I remember once reading was that reason for why names like Septimus, Octavius, Decimus and so forth were so common in ancient Rome stemmed from many parents naming their 7ths, 8th, tenth and etc kids just by the numerical order of their arrival to save too much sentimental thought on a baby that was more likely than not going to die long before it matured. A case of grimness so ingrained to the expectations of life that a callous acceptance is taken for granted.

lifeisstillgood 3y ago

>>> An architect, when he has received the commission for some public work, promises in advance what the cost is to be. After 2,000 years surely we should have found a more realistic means of judging projects and success than the upfront guesstimate …

duxup 3y ago
Human nature is hard to avoid.
samus 3y ago
In the face of scope creep, changing requirements, unforeseeable external factors, and purely human factors (like corruption, incompetence, neglect, internal rivalries, etc.), projects always faced huge risks. Projects nowadays are vastly bigger in scope (perhaps unnecessarily so), but the usual mechanisms to control the inefficiencies of bureaucracies are not easy to scale up.
mulmen 3y ago
How are you sure there is a better method than the educated guess? We have sophisticated methods of guessing and risk mitigation but I don’t believe there’s a fundamentally different approach.
arccy 3y ago
instead we have cost plus contracts
Arrath 3y ago
Ah, the good old engineer estimate.

seagreen 3y ago

Link to the mentioned section of De Architectura by Vitruvius: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20239/20239-h/20239-h.htm#Page_281 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20239/20239-h/20239-h.htm#Pa...

sema4hacker 3y ago
I only read the first couple of paragraphs, but they imply that the architect (designer) and engineer (builder) were one and the same. Was that the case?

Simon_ORourke 3y ago

The article itself is a bit light on actual specifics, but perhaps the ancient literature is less inclined to write about some project out in the provinces that didn't quite come off as planned, versus some of the eye-watering stuff they actually accomplished. I've not read Suetonius for a good 20 years or more, but I vaguely remember some piece where he recounts about having the engineering saavy to flood the amphitheatre in Rome to host mock naval battles. Well mock battles in the sense that the poor guys actually fighting and dying are only doing "pretend" battles, but you know what I mean.

golergka 3y ago
A lot of ancient writers didn't shy away from writing awful things about emperors. You could say that it was for propaganda purposes of their successors, but regardless of their motives, why wouldn't they write about their construction failures as well?
- boomboomsubban 3y ago
  Attempting a public works project could still be seen as a positive thing? "Nero at least tried to build new baths, what has Domitian ever done for us?"
  - a_gnostic 3y ago
    ROMANI ITE DOMVM!
    - npsomaratna 3y ago
      ROMANES EUNT DOMUS!
- bimguy 3y ago
  Remember, we aren't talking about modern society with access to a ton of recording essentials, we are talking about a very select few educated individuals (given the overall population) that were probably preoccupied writing much more important things then a building project failure.

willmadden 3y ago

I think this article misses the point. First of all, it's written for entry-level readers, or advanced idiots. Second, the focus should be on lost technology and the wisdom of building past 100 years of life expectency with durable goods, and how we could leverage the best parts of this approach where it makes sense (sans climate change idiocracy).

nelox 3y ago

If only the Romans had actually completed the Colosseum. It truly was a wonderful concept. Sadly it seems the engineering challenges were never the issue, only a lack of political will and shortsightedness ultimately led to the failure of the project.

joshmarinacci 3y ago
What are you talking about. It was finished and used until an earthquake damaged it.

mp05 3y ago

Think how much more the Romans would have accomplished with a great scrummaster versed in agile project management ceremonies and jargon.

froh 3y ago
grreat "thanks". now how do I get the Cleopatra (1963) images back out of my head when our high priests conduct their next SaFE rituals? https://youtu.be/vB5Wv8IHVf0?si=9lG7vcxJVMWfVrgn https://youtu.be/vB5Wv8IHVf0?si=9lG7vcxJVMWfVrgn
doctor_eval 3y ago
It could have been epic!

1-6 3y ago

[flagged]

hansonpeter 3y ago

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wwwpatdelcom 3y ago

First off, I'm glad we all got our daily thought about the Roman Empire in today. Secondly, this author is much more qualified than me to either agree or refute this; I believe we need to be incredibly skeptical when reading about Roman Engineering failures. I wrote and researched about this, using some of Vitruvius' writings last year: https://patdel.substack.com/p/why-didnt-ancient-rome-have-a-space https://patdel.substack.com/p/why-didnt-ancient-rome-have-a-.... * Rome was incredibly paternalistic, so pointing out the failures of others without appropriate aristocratic station might not have been quite the exercise in pure engineering that we might consider engineering to be today, even though Rome obviously made great engineering accomplishments and one might think that celebrated Roman architects could not be writing anything other than in a strictly professional manner. I think that when we read Vitruvius through a modern lens, we might think, "Oh this dude was a real professional, he makes good points," when in reality I think, at least in the example I point out in my blog post, I think he might have been using an example of failure to say, "See? Only royals, aristocrats and rich people should even try to innovate." Granted, there wasn't liability insurance for architectural or engineering failures as far as I am aware so this belief may have been prudent in terms of saving lives, but I think there was probably a primarily social-religious reasoning for it. The idea of the rich, hereditary classes, the father of the household, the ones in charge being the only ones, "allowed," to innovate was deeply held in Ancient Rome, much like in Confucianism and other agricultural societies that have formed through human history. "Don't rock the boat." I don't think it was until the 1500's or so that humanity started to collectively emerge out of that type of mentality as pre-industrialization and the scientific revolution began. Eventually the aristocrats (in Europe) saw non-royals being so successful at being industrialists, they wanted in on the game and removed laws that prevented them from engaging in capitalism. The author writes: > Its failure became a cautionary tale of an unrealistic project that sought to go beyond what nature allowed. Five decades later, the Roman senator and historian Tacitus claimed that evidence of this ‘futile ambition’ could still be seen in the rock faces near Avernus. Interestingly, Tacitus did not blame the vainglorious and weak-willed emperor alone, but also the architects who conceived the project and were judged to have ‘frittered away the resources of a Caesar’. I read that as the author saying that Tacitus was angling the engineering failure analysis in a political way, not a purely engineering post-failure-analysis way. E.g., the project might have even been a success but then Tacitus just lied about it, we don't know.

Arn_Thor 3y ago

“ However, Trajan still thought it important for such projects to go ahead if properly managed – the need for infrastructure and public buildings did not vanish just because previous efforts to construct them had been incompetently handled.” Something something HS2…

SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago

I'll refer to the The Tunnel of Eupalinos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_of_Eupalinos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_of_Eupalinos Which is Ancient Greek, and did not fail, but did require remedial engineering afterwards to make it work. > Apparently, the subsidence at the spring lowered the level of the water after work had begun, leaving the tunnel too high. A separate channel had to be dug below the east half of the tunnel to carry the water itself.