by Will Durant
The extractive industries were manned almost wholly by slaves or criminals. The gold and silver mines of Dacia, Gaul, and Spain, the lead and tin of Spain and Britain, the copper of Cyprus and Portugal, the sulphur of Sicily, the salt beds of Italy, the iron of Elba, the marble of Luna, Hymettus, and Paros, the porphyry of Egypt, and in general all subsoil natural resources, were owned by the state, were operated by it or on lease from it, and provided a main source of the national revenue; the gold of Spain alone yielded Vespasian $44,000,000 a year.13 The quest for minerals was a chief source of imperialist conquest; the mineral wealth of Britain, says Tacitus, was “the prize of victory” in Claudius’ campaign.14 Wood and charcoal were the chief fuels. Petroleum was known in Commagene, Babylonia, and Parthia,15 and the defenders of Samosata threw it in flaming torches upon Lucullus’ troops; but there is no sign of its commercial use as a fuel.I Coal was found in the Peloponnesus and northern Italy, but was used chiefly by smiths.16 The art of carburizing iron into steel had now spread from Egypt throughout the Empire. Most ironworkers, coppersmiths, goldsmiths, and silversmiths had a single forge and worked with one or two apprentices. At Capua, Minturnae, Puteoli, Aquileia, Como, and elsewhere several forges and smelters were united in factories; those at Capua were apparently large-scale capitalist enterprises externally financed.
The building trades were well organized and specialized. Dendrophoroi (“tree-bearers”) cut and delivered the wood, fabri lignarii (“woodworkers”) made houses and furniture, caementarii mixed the cement, structores laid the foundations, arcuarii built the arches, parietarii raised the walls, tectores applied plaster, albarii whitewashed it, artifices plumbarii inserted the plumbing—usually with pipes of lead (plumbum), and marmorii paved marble floors; we may imagine the jurisdictional disputes. Bricks and tiles were provided by potteries, many of which had reached the factory stage. Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius owned such factories and made fortunes from them.17 The kilns of Arretium, Mutina, Puteoli, Surrentum, and Pollentia supplied the ordinary tableware of all the European and African provinces as well as Italy. This wholesale production laid no claim to artistic excellence; the emphasis was now frankly on quantity; and the terra sigillata (“signed earthenware”) that now crowded the Italian market was distinctly inferior to the earlier product of Arretium. Outstanding work, as we shall see, was done in glass.
The factory production of glass, brick, tiles, pottery, and metalware does not warrant us in ascribing an industrial capitalism to ancient Italy. Rome itself had only two large factories—a paper mill and a dyeing establishment;18 probably neither metals nor fuels were at hand in quantity, and the profits of politics seemed more honorable than the proceeds of industry. In the factories of central Italy almost all the workers, and some of the managers, were slaves; in those of north Italy there was a greater proportion of freemen. Slaves were still sufficiently available to discourage the development of machinery; listless slave labor, with small stake in the product, was not likely to make inventions; some labor-saving devices were rejected because they might have caused technological unemployment; and the purchasing power of the people was too low to stimulate or support mechanized production.19 There were of course many simple machines, common to Italy, Egypt, and the Greek world: screw presses, screw pumps, water wheels, animal-driven grain mills, spinning wheels, looms, the crane and pulley, the revolving mold for pottery. . . . But Italian life was now (A.D. 96) as highly industrialized as life was ever to be until the nineteenth century. It would hardly go further on the basis of slavery and a high concentration of wealth. Roman law contracepted large organizations by requiring every sharer in an industrial undertaking to be a legally responsible partner; it forbade “limited liability” companies and allowed joint-stock corporations only for the performance of governmental contracts. Since similar restrictions affected banks, these could seldom provide capital for large-scale enterprise. At no time would the industrial development of Rome or Italy equal that of Alexandria or the Hellenistic East.
III. THE CARRIERS
From Caesar to Commodus wheeled vehicles were forbidden in Rome by day; people then walked, or were carried in slave-borne chairs or litters. For longer distances they traveled on horseback or in horse-drawn carriages or chariots. Travel by public stagecoach averaged some sixty miles a day. Caesar once rode by carriage 800 miles in eight days; messengers bearing the news of Nero’s death to Galba in Spain covered 332 miles in thirty-six hours; Tiberius, hurrying day and night, rode in three days 600 miles to stand beside his dying brother. The public post, by carriage or horse at all hours, averaged one hundred miles a day. Augustus had modeled it on the Persian system, as indispensable to imperial administration. It was called cursus publicus as serving the res publica, or commonwealth, by carrying official correspondence. Private individuals could use it only by rare and special permission through a government diploma (“double-folded”) or passport entitling the bearer to certain privileges and introducing him en route to persons of diplomatic importance. A more rapid means of communication was sometimes arranged by semaphores flashing signals from point to point; by this primitive telegraph the arrival of the grain ships at Puteoli was quickly made known to worried Rome. Nonofficial correspondence went by special courier or merchants or traveling friends; some traces suggest the existence, under the Empire, of private companies arranging to transmit private mail. Fewer letters were written than now, and better. Nevertheless, the movement of intelligence over western and southern Europe was as rapid in Caesar’s day as at any time before the railway. In 54 B.C.. Caesar’s letter from Britain reached Cicero at Rome in twenty-nine days; in 1834 Sir Robert Peel, hurrying from Rome to London, required thirty days.20
Communication and transport were immensely aided by the consular roads. These were the tentacles of Roman law, the members by which the mind of Rome became the will of the realm. They achieved in the ancient world a commercial revolution comparable in kind with that which the railroads effected in the nineteenth century. Until steam transportation came, the roads of medieval and modern Europe were inferior to those of the Empire under the Antonines. Italy alone had then 372 main routes, and 12,000 miles of paved thoroughfares; the Empire had 51,000 miles of paved highways and a pervasive network of secondary roads. Highways ran over the Alps to Lyons, Bordeaux, Paris, Rheims, Rouen, and Boulogne; others to Vienna, Mainz, Augsburg, Cologne, Utrecht, and Leiden; and from Aquileia a road skirted the Adriatic to connect with the Via Egnatia to Thessalonica. Magnificent bridges replaced the ferries that had crept across a thousand impeding streams. At every mile on the consular roads stone markers gave the distance to the next town; 4000 of these survive. At intervals seats were placed for tired travelers. At every tenth mile a statio offered a stopping place, where fresh horses could be hired; at every thirty miles was a mansio—an inn that was also a store, a saloon, and a brothel.21 The main halting points were the civitates, cities, usually equipped with fair hotels, which were in some cases owned and managed by the municipal government.22 Most innkeepers robbed their guests whenever convenient, and other thieves made the highways unsafe at night despite a garrison of soldiers at each statio. “Itineraries” could be bought, showing routes, stations, and intermediate distances.23 Rich men, disdaining the inns, brought their equipage and slaves with them, and slept in their guarded carriages or in the homes of friends or officials on the way.
Despite all difficulties, there was probably more traveling in Nero’s day than at any time before our birth. “Many people,” says Seneca, “make long voyages to see some remote sight”;24 and Plutarch speaks of “globe-trotters who spend the best part of their lives in inns and on boats.”25 Educated Romans flocked to Greece and Egypt and Greek Asia, scratched their names on historic monuments, sought healing waters or climates, ambled by art collections in the temples, studied under famous philosophers, rhetors, or physicians, and doubtless used Pausanias as their Baedeker.26
These “grand tours” usually involved a voyage o
n one or more of the merchant vessels that cut the Mediterranean with a hundred routes of trade. “Look at the harbors and seas,” exclaimed Juvenal, “filled with great keels, more peopled than the land.”27 Rome’s rival ports, Puteoli, Portus, and Ostia, were alive with fabri navales building ships, stuppatores calking them, saburarii loading sand into them as ballast, sacrarii unloading grain in sacks, mensores weighing it, lenuncularii operating tenders between large ships and the shore, and urinatores diving for goods fallen into the sea. Of corn barges alone twenty-five were drawn up the Tiber every working day; if we add the transport of building stone, metals, oil, wine, and a thousand other articles, we picture a river teeming with commerce and noisy with loading and carrying machines, with dockmen, porters, stevedores, traders, brokers, and clerks.
Ships were driven with sails, aided by one or more banks of oars. They were larger, on the average, than before; Athenaeus describes a grain cargo vessel as 420 feet long with a fifty-seven-foot beam;29 but this was highly exceptional. Some vessels had three decks; many took 250, several took a thousand, tons of freight. Josephus tells of one that carried 600 persons—passengers and crew;30 another carried an Egyptian obelisk as large as that in Central Park, New York, together with 200 sailors, 1300 passengers, 93,000 bushels of wheat, and a load of linen, pepper, paper, and glass.31 Nevertheless, voyages except along the coasts were still dangerous, as Saint Paul found; between November and March only a few vessels ventured across the open Mediterranean, and in midsummer eastward voyages were made almost impossible by the etesian winds. Night sailing was now frequent, and every harbor of any pretense had a good lighthouse. Danger of piracy had almost disappeared from the Mediterranean. To discourage it, and starve rebellion, Augustus had stationed two main war fleets at Ravenna on the Adriatic and at Misenum on the Bay of Naples, besides minor squadrons at ten other points in the Empire. We may judge what Pliny called “the immense majesty of the Roman peace” by the fact that for two centuries we hardly hear of these fleets.
Passenger schedules were largely indefinite, as sailings were determined by weather and commercial convenience. Rates were low—e.g., two drachmas ($1.20) from Athens to Alexandria; but passengers brought their own food, and probably most of them slept on deck. Speed was as moderate as the fares, and varied with the winds, averaging six knots per hour; one might cross the Adriatic in a day, or, like Cicero, take three weeks from Patrae to Brundisium. A swift cruiser might make 230 knots in twenty-four hours.32 With favorable winds, six days carried one from Sicily to Alexandria or from Gades to Ostia, and four from Utica to Rome.33 The longest and most dangerous voyage was the six-month sail from Aden, in Arabia, to India, for monsoons forced vessels to hug the pirate-breeding coast all the way. At some time before A.D. 50 an Alexandrian Greek skipper, Hippalus, charted the periodicity of the monsoon winds and found that in certain seasons he could sail directly and safely across the Indian Ocean. The discovery was almost as important for that sea as the voyage of Columbus was for the Atlantic. From Egyptian ports on the Red Sea ships thereafter sailed to India in forty days. About A.D. 80 another Alexandrian captain, of unknown name, wrote a Periplus of the Erythrean Sea as a handbook for merchants trading along the east African coast and with India. Meanwhile other mariners had developed routes through the Atlantic to Gaul, Britain, Germany, even to Scandinavia and Russia.34 Never before in human memory had the seas borne so many vessels, products, and men.
IV. THE ENGINEERS
The ships and roads that carried goods, the bridges that bound the roads, the harbors and docks that received the ships, the aqueducts that brought clean water to Rome, the sewers that drained the rural marshes and the city’s waste, were the work of Roman, Greek, and Syrian engineers operating with armies of free labor, legionaries, and slaves. They raised or drew heavy loads or stones by pulleys on cranes or vertical beams, worked by windlasses on treadmills turned by animals or men.35 They banked the treacherous Tiber with walls set back in three stages, so that low water would not expose the muddy bed.II They dredged a multiple harbor at Ostia for Claudius, Nero, and Trajan, opened lesser havens at Marseilles, Puteoli, Misenum, Carthage, Brundisium, and Ravenna, and renewed the greatest of all at Alexandria. They emptied the Fucine Lake and reclaimed its bed for cultivation by boring a tunnel through a mountain of rock. They lined the subsoil of Rome with sewers of concrete, brick, and tile which lasted for hundreds of years. They drained the swamps of Campania sufficiently to make it habitable, for many sumptuous palaces are indicated by the ruins there.36III They executed the astonishing public works by which Caesar and the emperors mitigated unemployment and beautified Rome.
The consular roads were among their simpler achievements. How did these highways compare with those of today? They were from sixteen to twenty-four feet wide, but near Rome part of this width was taken up with sidewalks (margines) paved with rectangular stone slabs. They went straight to their goal in brave sacrifice of initial economy to permanent saving: they overleaped countless streams with costly bridges, crossed marshes with long, arched viaducts of brick and stone, climbed up and down steep hills with no use of cut and fill, and crept along mountainsides or high embankments secured by powerful retaining walls. Their pavement varied with locally available material. Usually the bottom layer (pavimentum) was a four- to six-inch bed of sand, or one inch of mortar. Upon this were imposed four strata of masonry: the statumen, a foot deep, consisting of stones bound with cement or clay; the rudens, ten inches of rammed concrete; the nucleus, twelve to eighteen inches of successively laid and rolled layers of concrete; and the summa crusta of silex or lava polygonal slabs, one to three feet in diameter, and eight to twelve inches thick. The upper surface of the slabs was smoothed, and the joints were so well fitted as to be hardly discernible. Occasionally the surface was of concrete; on less important roads it might be of gravel; in Britain it was composed of flint stones laid in cement upon a gravel bed. The substructure was so deep that little attention was given to drainage. All in all, these were the most durable roads in history. Many of them are still in use; but their steep gradients, designed for pack mules and small vehicles, have compelled their abandonment by modern traffic.37
The bridges that carried these roads were themselves high exemplars of wedded science and art. The Romans inherited from Ptolemaic Egypt the principles of hydraulic engineering; they employed them on an unprecedented scale, and the methods they transmitted remained unchanged till our time. They carried to its ancient limit the building of foundations and piers under water. They drove into the bed a double cylinder of piles, boarded each cylinder tightly, drained the water from between them, covered the exposed bottom with rock or lime, and on this basis raised the pier. Eight bridges crossed the Tiber at Rome: some sacredly ancient like the Pons Sublicius, on which no metal might be used; some so well built that like the Pons Fabricius they are functioning to this day. From these spans the Roman arch would go forth to bridge a hundred thousand streams in the white man’s world.
Pliny thought that the aqueducts were Rome’s greatest achievement. “If one will note the abundance of water skillfully brought into the city for many public and private uses; if he will observe the lofty aqueducts required to maintain a proper elevation and grade, the mountains that had to be pierced, the depressions that had to be filled—he will conclude that the whole globe offers nothing more marvelous.”38 From distant springs fourteen aqueducts, totaling 1300 miles, brought through tunnels and over majestic arches into Rome some 300,000,000 gallons of water daily—as large a quantity per capita as in any modern city.39 These structures had their faults; leaks developed in the lead pipes and required frequent repair; by the end of the Western Empire all the aqueducts had gone out of use.IV But when we consider that they fed ample water to homes, tenements, palaces, fountains, gardens, parks, and public baths where thousands bathed at once, and that enough remained to create artificial lakes for naval battles, we begin to see that despite terror and corruption Rome was the best managed capit
al of antiquity and one of the best equipped cities of all time.
At the head of the water department at the close of the first century was Sextus Julius Frontinus, whose books have made him the most famous of Roman engineers. He had already served as praetor, as governor of Britain, and several terms as consul. Like modern British statesmen he found time to write books as well as to govern states; he published a work on military science, of which the concluding portion, Stratagemata, remains,V and left us his personal account of the water system of Rome (De aquis urbis Romae). He describes the corruption and malfeasance that he found in his department on taking office, and how palaces and brothels secretly tapped the water mains, and so greedily that once Rome ran out of water.41 He describes his resolute reforms; tells in proud detail the sources, length, and function of each aqueduct; and concludes like Pliny: “Who will venture to compare with these mighty conduits the idle Pyramids, or the famous but useless works of the Greeks?”42 We sense here the frankly utilitarian Roman with little taste for beauty apart from use; we can understand him and admit that a city should have clean water before it has Parthenons. Through these artless books we perceive that even in the age of the despots there were Romans of the old type, men of ability and integrity, conscientious administrators who made the Empire prosper under the lords of misrule and opened a way for monarchy’s golden age.
