Who\'s responsible for Roman engineering?

[Carlton Bach]

So, when I often hear it said that there was no middle class in Rome, what they mean is that the Roman middle class was 'kinda small'. How else could you make a living as a landless(by that I mean non-producing land) free person in Rome?

I think it's more a matter of 'we don't have evidence of a Roman concept of middle class'. Modern Western civilisation is pretty much a middle class creation, born from the roots in the medieval class of burghers, not noble, yet not peasant, not rich, yet not poor, and not landowning. In Romew, such a social class never defined itself, mostly, I suspect, because wealth was conceptually tied to land ownership (a burgher could not easily acquire land under feudal law, so they needed to develop other ways of defining 'wealthy', but a Roman could just buy a villa or urban real estate). That way, the social divide was conceptualised as between the 'wealthy' (with huge differences between the top level and the lowest curials) and the rest. What we would think of as 'middle class' would fall right across this divide. There's not really a Roman word for it.

In fact, there appears to have been a high level of differentiation in what the upper crust perceived as 'the poor' (just like the 'working class' today is hugely differentiated). We just don't understand it very well. van Nijf explores it in his study of the collegia in Eastern cities, apparently there were professional associations with a degree of civic influence and a strong sense of separateness from the poor on their part. He uses the terms 'plebs media' or 'plebs togata' for them, but with the usual caveat that we don't really know what the Romans understood by these words. Most engineers and architects would probably have belonged to that group, with an opportunity to reise to the level of 'wealthy' by purchasing land and being coopted into the local curia for the successful ones.