Who\'s responsible for Roman engineering?

[floofthegoof]

After the conquest of Greece, Rome was facing a real problem at home due to the influx of highly skilled slaves. Apparantly, if a Roman citizen found himself having to sell his land, There was almost no means of employment available in order to sustain himself. The remedies of the two Gracchi were rejected and the brothers killed, and the issue went unresolved. Thereafter, there was basically no middle class in Rome.

Most of the Roman monuments and wonders we see today come from imperial times. Without a middle class of engineers, who conceived and built these things? Greek Slaves?

[Carlton Bach]

There is a long time between the age of the Gracchi and the Flavian/Antonine building boom. By way of a comparison, wh is buying all those cars and houses in America after the inflation following the War of 1812 wiped out the middle classes' savings?

To get back to the point, the architectusral wonders of the Rpoman Empire were built by mostly free engineers, apparently usually trained in a family tradition, the state service, or the army. Quite shocking to modern ideas, there does not appear to hae been any certification system, and mamy of the men in the profession don't actually seem to have been terribly capable. If you said you were an engineer and someone gave you work as an engineer, you were one (at least until the first building came down - Roman law *did* recognise product liability). I assume most hiring went viA word of mouth advertising, with writings and public debates playing a part in the highest circles (Vitruvius' books seem to have started life as an advertising pamphlet for an aspiring, and eventually unsuccessful, star architect). Good engineers were valuable, and often 'retained' by the emperor in some fashion (Pliny asks for some to be sent to his province at one point).

I would not exclude the possibility that some wealthy people had their slaves trained as architects, or got lucky and bought a freshly enslaved one, but by and large it appears to have been a job for free people (or at least independent freedmen). Greeks were probably well represented in it, too, given the lead of the Eastern provinces in many education-based matters. But the Romans were proud of their engineering prowess, so it was the kind of thing even a very traditional Italian parterfamilias could consider.

[tlclark]

Ditto what Carlton said.

By way of evidence, the famous tomb of the Haterii shows a freedman family business of engineers with cranes and great wheels. Clearly it was a prestigious position, but Carlton is right that there is no certification. In fact there is no real distinction between a builder and an "architect". Architecture as a theory was rather abstract and there was precious little in the way of advance planning. This was basically the way it remained until well until the middle ages. Many of the greatest works of Roman engineering are only known by the name of the patron, rather than the builders.

Rarely Romans go beyond their master builders to theorists, the most famous example is Anthemios of Tralles and Isidoros of Miletus a geometer and mekanikoi (engineer) chosen to build hagia sophia, but that was a rare building.

Travis

[floofthegoof]

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?

[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.