Looking at the ancient world, one of the most striking things about it is the glacial pace of innovation. It seems that there should be a question of why this is. I am going to suggest two possible causes of it.
Income Inequality
Juvenal was a satirical poet who lived approximately from 55-138 AD; his exact date of birth and death are unknown. His life overlapped with that of the early Church. Unlike most Roman writers, Juvenal knew Roman society from the bottom up, including its many deviant behaviors. At any rate, in one of his satires, he draws a picture of the finances of a person with the ‘vital minimum’ for a Roman citizen to exist on. This ‘vital minimum’ is 20,000 sesterces per year. The major business of the upper classes was lending at interest at 5%; to earn that much required 400,000 sesterces of capital. 400,000 was the threshold of the equestrians or equites. These were members, along with senatorial class, of the ruling oligarchy. The senatorial class was limited to 600 members. This oligarchy was a tiny sliver of the population of Rome, and yet the produce of the entire empire was at their disposal.
Put another way, you had to be a well-connected millionaire to live at the poverty line in ancient Rome. If Rome in this era had 1.2 million people, and the empire had 60 million people, then those free men who could afford a decent life amount to about 1.25% of the people in Rome, or 15,000 people in Rome, many of whom were insanely wealthy.
The 1% is a guess, based on the following calculation. The dole was known to feed 130,000 families in Rome, and each family had 5 people, or 650,000 people. About 1/3 of Rome was slaves who were ineligible for the dole, or 400,000 people. Everyone else amounts to only 150,000 people, which is the entire upper and middle class in Rome. If seems unlikely that many more than 10% of the remainder in Rome would be members of the elite equite class, meaning that approximately 15,000 people lived above the poverty line. If each household had 5 members, then there were 3,000 households.
From an industrial viewpoint, this is your potential market. It is too small to support an advanced technological base. Unless something happens to change that income distribution, then no industrial progress can be made, because there are no customers for your factory’s output.
Society has an economic system. There must be a buyer for every seller. The Roman Empire had about 50 million people scattered all over Europe, the Middle East, and Northern Africa. It had about 20 people per square mile, which is a fairly low population density. All of the resources of this territory and these people were devoted to the small slice of oligarchs, insanely rich, who ruled the Empire. These oligarchs led, for the most part, dissolute sexual lives.
As a result of the oppression, Romans failed at the one thing every society needs – children. The oligarchs and their women were too busy having ‘fun’ and making money to have babies, and so the population of the rich shrank. The poor and the slaves had a very low rate of reproduction, so the overall population declined.
Poor Management
There was undoubtedly much corruption in the Roman Empire during this time. Slaves not only did the menial jobs like agricultural labor; they also were managers of enterprises. As the saying goes, ‘you get what you pay for’. The Roman upper class was so cheap and so power hungry that people who in a modern society would be well-paid managers, were on the dole or scraping by with a low standard of living.
Instead, slaves ran things. There was very little inclination to change things and introduce new methods. In modern industrial enterprises, much innovation comes from the bottom up, that is from workers. The modern manager is expected to innovate and provide new and improved products and services.
In ancient Rome, no such sentiment prevailed. Thus we see archaic practices in nearly everything. Ships were built, for example, outside-in. The planks were fastened together and then the internal skeleton and bracing was put in. Soon after the fall of the Roman Empire (476 AD), around 600 AD, builders began to save time and money by making an internal skeleton and then fastening planking to it, which is how it is done today. The Roman method was wasteful, but no manager had any incentive to try something better. If it failed, he might be fired, or sold into a worse condition by an irate master.
Another example comes from agriculture. Romans had knowledge that legumes improved the soil (they add nitrogen, a key element, to it). They also needed summer forage, since rainfall in Italy stopped during the summer. Finally, all grains are, from a human viewpoint, deficient in the amino acid lysine, whereas legumes (beans and peas) are one of the few types of plant foods with lysine in abundance. Humans are better off eating beans and bread, rather than just bread, because the protein is better (Romans ate a largely vegetarian diet).
The Romans had a two-field system: wheat one year, fallow the next. The fallow was to restore the soil fertility and add soil moisture. They knew all of these things (except perhaps the nutritional value of beans), but they never fully adopted a three-field rotation: wheat, beans, fallow, even though such a rotation was mentioned by Roman agricultural writers. That practice was instituted by Christians during the Dark Ages, and it improved yields, maintained soil fertility and improved nutrition.
Image vs. Reality
The image usually painted of the Roman Empire is of a rich land, filled with peace and prosperity: Pax Romana or Roman Peace. I have even read scholars who said that they would rather live during the Pax Romana, especially the during reign of the five ‘good’ emperors (96-180 AD) than any other time or place in history. As one scholar put it, “Antiquity was far more advanced than the Middle Ages.1” That might perhaps be true for the rich, but it is not true for the poor and middle class. It seems rather obvious that a portion of Classical scholarship sought to portray Ancient Rome in the most favorable light, compared to the Dark Ages.
Many Classical scholars were indifferent to the plight of the poor and the weak. They felt that the contributions of Greek civilization to Western civilization that justified the slavery and misery that the Greeks imposed on their subjects. Supposedly modern Europe and its colonies such as the US would not have existed without Greek culture. This is nonsense. Our institutions and our technological society grew out of the much-maligned Dark Ages. It did not come from the Greeks and Romans.
Christianity has always championed the weak over the powerful and the poor over the rich. Since economics is a system, that is not only a moral stance; it is also good for business. This means curbing the excesses of the rich and powerful, which is probably why some of them hate it.
Sources:
Population
Carcopino, Jerome, Daily Life in Ancient Rome, chapter 3, Society and Social Classes, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1940, pp 52-75.
Shipbuilding
Unger, Richard W., The Ship in the Medieval Economy, McQueen’s University Press, Montreal, 1980, pp 33-74.
Farming
White, K. D., Roman Farming, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1970, pp 110-124.
References
1Lot, Ferdinand, The End of the Ancient World, Harper Torchbooks, Harper and Row, NY, 1961, p 63.
