How did Ancient Rome achieve a level of infrastructure we didn't achieve in the West again until the 19th century with technology worse than what we had in the middle ages?
How did Ancient Rome achieve a level of infrastructure we didn't achieve in the West again until the 19th century with...
Nathan Brooks
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Brayden Russell
for the predominance of their infrastructure building days they paid in a standard of currency called a silver denarius that had a high % content of the precious metal; silver. the point of their expansive empire namely through spain through to england was for the mining of this resource: silver. this has set the precident to this day
Brandon Cox
the lack of a faith where the whole point of life is to praise god every day so you get to heaven in the end, in the middle ages there was no pressure to create a better civilization because everyone firmly believed theyd go to paradise after death until the plague made people stop trusting the church as much
Ayden Cox
The realm was largely peaceful, and good wages encouraged people to learn craftsmanship and do lots of good work. They paid these wages in silver denarii. Currency would layer be devalued and after Rome fell the entire economy broke down, making infrastructure harder to build or maintain. Because territory became more segmented and feudalism meant decentralization, large scale infrastructure work was harder to coordinate. Only after feudalism died and Europe became relatively stable could infrastructure again reach its ancient height.
Nathaniel Jenkins
Did Rome have comedians?
Not like... comedy playwrights, but like... dudes who just told jokes for a living.
What would Roman comedy sound like?
William Morris
Yeah they were called philosophers and Christians.
Oliver Davis
maybe jesters, like they had in the European royalty in medieval times
Elijah Bell
epic post
Isaiah Phillips
>The realm was largely peaceful
No it wasn't.
Christian Johnson
in the middle ages rulers lacked the wealth to sustain a standing army needed for such an empire.
Henry Johnson
I recommend you read Apuleius' Golden Ass and Petronius' Satyricon. They're pretty comic.
>infrastructure
If we're talking solely about infrastructure here, it might be easy to ascribe a lot of it to a culture where rich aristocrats competed with one another to build elaborate structures and complete massive projects in order to win approval and live on in history. Baths, law courts, fora and aqueducts for instance were mostly built by individual rich men from their cities. Two cities in Bithynia literally had a rivalry that lasted 600 years over which was better and Pliny complains about one of them bankrupting themselves in an effort to build as much shit as possible. Roads on the other hand were considered militarily essential due to the empire's large distances and so were built frequently. This in turn led to the development of market towns and waystations along them precipitating the heavily urbanised (by contemporary standards) nature of the Roman Empire. When the aristocrats were beleaguered by ever more demands from the Roman state they stopped investing in new infrastructure projects, very few things were built after the 4th century aside from military infrastructure and Churchs.
Arguably the army was an important factor. As soon as the Roman legions were taken from Britain, within 30 years people had lost the ability to build concrete buildings, create complex structures and maintain roads. Without coinage and a complex money economy, there was nothing to preserve the established order and keep skilled craftsmen and architects employed.
Christian Gray
You don't need technology to have infrastructure, you need organisation.
Check out the Inca for example, not even wheels yet their entire empire was connected by joggers.
Camden James
lol
Bentley Parker
kek
Luis Barnes
biggest thing Romans had going for them that made the empire successful was water, with the Roman aqueducts being the lifeblood of the empire that made large cities possible are bountiful harvests a routine event. Hell Rome would be the first city ever to reach a population of 1 million, but once the aqueduct was destroyed, the city fell to less than 30,000 people.
European cities after Rome were limited to just hugging the major rivers as a source for water, with major aqueduct and canal projects not resuming until Louis XIV's reign.
Angel Cooper
You think France, the Low Countries, Great Britain and the Iberian peninsula had better infrastructure under the Romans than during the Late Middle Ages?
There is practically no way the volume of trade, urbanization and population of Western Europe was somehow better during Roman occupation than during later eras. Looking purely at road building I might agree but when you take into account the trade carried on on rivers and at sea, the bridges and the number of cities.
Asher Flores
does pax romana ring a bell
Brayden Brooks
How are roads not infastructure?
Liam Davis
I can't think of many pre-industrial cities that don't lay next to a river, Jerusalem being the exception.
The sheer advantage of water transport over land based transport made a city that wasn't close to a river commercially nonviable.
Jerusalem was actually a major headache for both Crusaders and the Seljuks because it was placed so shitty, if it wasn't for the fact that it was holy it would still be a small hilltop village to this day. Like most Bronze age cities people would just leave it.
Austin Sanders
>Roman-Parthian Wars
>peaceful
>Germanic incursions
>peaceful
Wyatt Morales
>Wars in the border
People living in Italy or Greece didn't need to worry about that shit
Ayden Clark
...
Ethan Jenkins
Yeah, they had to worry about some general on the Danube getting uppity and starting a civil war just because his troops were bored. The Roman Empire was in a state of almost constant civil war due to the mandatary nature of the imperial title
Logan Bailey
>People living in Italy or Greece didn't need to worry
Wrong retard. Germanic threat was a constant high alert for the Roman army, hence why you had a huge force of legion armies constantly camped and garrisoned across the Rhine river's western banks. Or the fact that Trajan's overly ambitious invasion of the Parthian Empire carried itself into overtaxing the student with the financial burden and bringing disease and pestilence to the Balkans and Southern Europe.
They worried for a reason.
Jackson Diaz
*overtaxing the state
Angel Ross
Looks like the romans couldn't break through to Scandinavia. It really is true that our viking blood is too strong.We even btfo'dt he romans LOL
Thomas Ramirez
You also lost like 9 gorillion wars against the Romans, Sven.
Anthony Young
The little ice age. During Roman times having two crops of wheat was doable on well manged farms far north as southern France. North Africa also had far more rain fall. This made base line food production far cheaper and it needed less of the total population framing to keep things going.
Mason Bailey
Because the first romans was ruled by kings who was black. Tarquinius superbus the last black king of rome was overthrown by the whiteys who ruled rome for a couple of centuries. Until sulla the great black general overthrew the whiteys and exterminated them in the social war. Now blacks was running rome again and a whitey wasnt seen in the region again until it was sacked by alaric and the whiteys eventually killed or sent the black romans to africa. In africa the black romans didnt have the means to create the infrastructure that they did in europe and the whitey barbarian europeans was too stupid to do anythang. Julius caesar was black
Camden Collins
but what about the medieval warm period
Jack Gomez
It did help things, however I would like to repeat "on well manged farms". Pre 12th century land management was very bad in Europe. A the heart of the issue was sub dividing plots that were really meant only for one family to work. Chirlden of both sexes would be giving a part of their fathers land ( for women it acted as a dowry). Repeat for a few generations, add the odd uncle with out kids of his own, and it ends up a mess. A peasant would work 4 to 9 very small plots of his own and work the lands of his lord as a means of rent. This means a lot of walking all over the place and ineffective plow use.
Starting around 1115 the French land owners got so fed up the issue that they started new farming villages ( with new rules) to pull some of the people out of old villages. This would free up some of the plots that could be then used to consolidate the private plots into being contiguous. Then changed the rules to limit the minimal size of a plot.
That greatly improved the food output. A few other food product improvement happen around the same time. Europe's Population grew very fast. Then the warm period end around 1300, read the link to see want happen.
Tyler Carter
Das rite senpai
Lucas Roberts
What do you think Syrians would defend Rome by themselves lmao