Was the question, "Do all roads lead to Rome?" answered? The blog's thesis seemed more to be, "roads that lead to Rome were on this map" like an old tourist map for Route 66 (mixed in with an NYC subway map), but surely there were other roads that Rome didn't care about when it came to logistics.
They were going crazy by the end, their collapse made space for the Islamic Golden Age, which is the main reason we have any surviving texts from the classical era. They were much more open to foreign ideas and had a focus on translation at a time when orthodoxy and nativism prevailed under Rome's rule.
The Roman Empire survived until at least the 13th century, when the capital was sacked by Christian crusaders. We know what continuation of the Roman Empire looks like, because it happened historically.
So are you saying it an empire with a slavery-fueled economy itself fueled by constant war of expansion would have been more desirable than Christian kingdoms based on serfdom also frequently at war with each other ?
Like what? The Greeks advanced science and mathematics. The Romans sacked Greece and pillaged their artifacts. They didn't advance science or mathematics at all. Rome was a 1,000 year dark age.
I would expect this answer from a reddit thread or a youtube comment, but not from HN. One would think such a silly and ignorant view of history would not be found here, but alas, it was.
Yours seems to be one of those opinions that can be summed up as "lol Greeks good Romans steal" when there is no shortage of technology and civil law improvements the Romans brought to light. To mention a few: a senate, aqueducts, urban planning, sanitation, civil engineering much better than that of the Greeks (see domes and arches), many ideals that are still present in today's governments, farms of quasi-industrial level production, and so forth.
That the Greeks made more developments in Maths is true - it was more of a cultural thing anyway. Your post also completely ignores the fact that Greece flourished under Roman rule and managed to keep many of its freedoms, with the protection of a giant empire. Romans also distributed Greek texts to all corners of the known world, wherein learned people could be found.
Your comment seriously sounds like that of a child, not at all something of the level of HN.
A council of elders, in various forms, long preceded the Romans. How would you distinguish "a senate" as a meaningful invention from the boule, gerousia, or similar body in many a Greek polis?
Because Renaissance Humanists told us so! Never mind the fact that the senate never wrote down their laws until a rebellion forced them to! How dare you question that we base our democracy on the Roman Senate (which was not elected)???
It was... sorta elected, in that you generally got in by having previously held any of several offices that were themselves generally elected (not very democratically by modern standards, but somewhat reasonably so compared to contemporary systems) or added to the body by an official (Censor) who was themselves elected.
Edited to add: I don't actually think it's unreasonable to take them at their word that the Roman Senate provided some meaningful inspiration for the US Senate, even if it ultimately wound up pretty different. That doesn't make it a good example of Roman innovation, though.
>many ideals that are still present in today's governments
Rome existed for more than a thousand years, and for five hundred of those years there was only an emperor (who didn't refer to himself as a king). I will give you that Rome was good at building but that doesn't stop it from being a dark age. And while Greece was mostly left alone they did not "flourish" and their output significantly decreased. The Romans were anti intellectual and cared more about their traditions than understanding the world. That's why the Romans used Greek statue building techniques to make status of themselves and of the Emperor instead of the gods like Greece did. To Romans they were their own gods. They didn't care about the natural world or about philosophy. They actually became better at statue building than the Greeks (after hundreds of years) which would probably be listed by you as a "Great Roman Achievement" but it's just the result of Aping Greek culture. The Romans themselves were in a sense aware of this; they would use Greek in official documents and would at times dress up in Greek Togas/Chitons. Caesar's Et tu, Brute? was actually spoken in Greek.
The funny thing here is that the idealization of the Greeks that you're up to here is directly inherited from the Romans who idealized the Classical and Hellenistic Greeks. But it's worth learning more about what the Greeks and Romans were really up to, since you've got ideas that are not well informed by the source material, and if you took the time to examine the evidence I think you'd be surprised at the sophistication of the Romans.
Also in this day and age the idealization of the Greeks is something that's largely an old cultural memory, but if you look at the Greeks in their ancient milieu, the "Greek Miracle" was largely an illusion based on lost earlier sources. The Greeks certainly were sophisticated intellectually and they've left a mark on history for it, but they didn't appear in as much of a vacuum as folks thought existed before modern archaeology.
>Afterwards he often made it clear that he was desirous of a second consulship, and once actually announced his candidacy, but when he was passed by and not elected, he made no further efforts to obtain the office, giving his attention to his duties as augur, and training his sons, not only in the nature and ancestral discipline in which he himself had been trained, but also, and with greater ardour, in that of the Greeks. For not only the grammarians and philosophers and rhetoricians, but also the modellers and painters, the overseers of horses and dogs, and the teachers of the art of hunting, by whom the young men were surrounded, were Greeks.[0]
I would suggest that you try taking a more modern approach to history that focuses more on learning about the subject while trying to see things without biases. Your value judgments about the Romans and the Greeks are where things fall apart for you, and they're unnecessary since there's actually no benefit in making that class of value judgment. If you could free yourself from that kind of thinking, and work as much as possible with evidence based reasoning about the past, I think you'd fare better in this domain.
My opinion is not so uncommon. I actually formed the opinion after reading several books about Rome; until then I had the same view as most here. That Rome was worse than what came before and after is gaining a lot of acceptance. It just isn't said as abruptly.
I did a Classics major and an MA, started on a PhD, and carried on studying since then for a few decades. I was a Hellenist in school, not a Latinist, and I share your admiration of the Greek's intellectual development, but your understanding of Rome is deeply ignorant. I saw younger students who fell for that ignorant view for a while, but they tended to outgrow it. Your view is an especially common one among the poorly educated, it's very immature which is just what makes it appealing, but it really is a foolish take to cling to, and does you more harm than help.
I find it is in fact the poorly educated who fetishize Rome. If you've never used any Greek math or studied the development of the early European universities then it is easy to see the the surface level buildings and statues of Rome where all roads lead to whereas looking at a maths textbook is all Greek to them. It's hard to accept Rome as being largely stagnant due to most people's unfamiliarity with the ancient world. Instead they compare Rome to the early middle ages in Europe as the barometer of a successful society for some reason.
I have read Euclid in Greek (and Proclus' commentaries on Euclid) and I'm a big fan of math history in general. My formal studies were tied in part to Greek mathematical history and axiomatization though more related to Plato & Aristotle, earlier stuff than Euclid. The issue here is your value judgments themselves, positive or negative, about Rome of the Greeks are actually stupid. The content of your thoughts outside those could be fine, but it's clearly very shallow, and until there's sufficient content there, your judgments are pointless. Once you reach that point that you have read widely in the Greek and Roman authors and read widely about the domain from scholars who are domain-experts, then you'd recognize that value judgments are not the point, and drop both your fetishization and your bashing, those are both stupid, and you're being stupid loudly here, you should be embarrassed. Rome is what it is, it's worth understanding, but turning it into some kind of historical foil for your bloviations is simply mindless and you should work to grow out of that.
This is my final statement on these matters, I have no interest in "debate" or conversation with someone who has no idea about what they're discussing and clings to strong value judgments over reason.
As someone who has studied these things for a very long time, perhaps longer than you've been alive, I have tried to help, but it is tedious.
I agree that the way I discussed the issue was wrong. I stand by my initial point that Rome was a dark age. I don't have "no idea" what I'm discussing. I agree that Rome is worth understanding, and I think the early humanist "we are far from the ancients" mindset that still exists today (for some odd reason) has gotten in the way of that. People seem to get lost in Rome's grandiose public works and lose sight of Rome's numerous faults. I think value judgments are warranted being that they are already being made. Wanting to go "back" to the ways Rome as many seem to desire to do (in some form) is clearly a value judgment as well as a severe error. Rome and it's culture simply did not value the natural world or abstract thought. That is perhaps what lead to the aimless conquest which in turn caused an almost global pause in scientific inquiry. Bedsides the issue with the layman understanding of Rome is also the perhaps more concerning academic view of it starting with Burckhardt and his understanding of the renaissance which is based on the Great Rome myth. So I think it is all warranted. Perhaps I should be embarrassed but so should the layman and the academics for constructing this "veil of ignorance" surrounding Rome and its failures.
Is your point entirely based on statues an emperors? None of what you said proves anything and you make baseless claims about them not caring about the natural world or philosophy. Bother to read actual Roman and Greek sources of the time and you will find yourself contradicted soon (Plutarch's Parallel Lives might be of use, then Cicero, etc). Seems clear to me that this opinion is not your own.
It's not based just on statues and emperors, though that shouldn't be ignored. The Roman's never adopted the Greek gymnasium, instead opting to have enslaved Greek philosophers tutor them at home[0] so that they could feel cultured. None of it was real and after a thousand years of LARPing as Greeks the Romans made zero contributions.
I wouldn't be so sure. "Imperātor" is a Latin word meaning "leader" or "commander." "Rex" is the word for "king" which was what the kings of Rome (that is, the emperors) were too ashamed to call themselves. Instead they projected power through endless propaganda while they claimed simply to be "first among the equals" (Princeps).
The Roman empire may not have much of a legacy in mathematics, though they did continue Greek traditions of philosophy and even had 'philosopher kings' [0], but they were very much leaders in engineering, and the legacy of Roman ingenuity is still alive today:
The influence of Roman roads can still be seen today [1], Roman concrete is still studied by modern material scientists for its properties [2], the Pantheon is still the largest concrete (only) dome in the world [3], and even the width of modern railroads can be traced back to Roman road standards [4]. That's not even mentioning aqueducts, some of which still stand today, that brought unknown levels of sanitary hygiene to cities at the time, or the fact that civil engineering wasn't even the main focus of Roman engineers (who were by and large associated with the military, often enabling the legions to beat impossible odds [5] and displaying a fairly modern understanding of the importance of logistics [6]). Like it or not, Rome was a STEM powerhouse, despite its lack of interest in 'pure' science or mathematics, and owed no small portion of its dominance to the prowess of its engineers.
I think you're missing my point. I'm not making a moral argument at all but a factual one. The Romans sacked Greece and killed Archimedes. All you have to do is look at the rate of mathematical and technological progress before and after Rome to see that Rome was a dark age. Before Rome we have the Pythagorean theorem, Euclid's Elements, Aristotle and many others. After Rome you have Kitab al-Jabr and later European Universities which were founded on Greek knowledge which had until then been discarded by the Romans.
>The Romans sacked Greece and killed Archimedes. All you have to do is look at the rate of mathematical and technological progress before and after Rome to see that Rome was a dark age.
So you really ought to take look at technological progress in Rome since you've got it absolutely backwards. The Romans were less inclined to sophisticated abstract thought than the Greeks, the sophisticated discourses on political theory especially were dead, and they weren't sophisticated mathematicians, but the Romans were certainly more sophisticated technologically than the Greeks.
Also the Greeks didn't just disappear once the Romans conquered their territory. The great Greek cities like Syracuse, Alexandria, Antioch, et al. carried on under the Romans while the Romans took great pains to preserve and promote Greek learning, while Roman engineering picked up every trick from every culture they encountered. You're surely familiar with the Antikthera mechanism, that was an orrery, a sophisticated Greek astronomical calculating device which the Romans continued to build for centuries.
The Romans had remarkably sophisticated technology which certainly eclipsed the Greeks on many fronts in architecture, aqueducts, et al. The development of concrete was a Roman invention that opened tremendous inventiveness.
The Romans were interested in other things. Their civil engineering, construction methods (e.g. concrete), public infrastructure, military technology, legal sophistication, etc. etc. etc. greatly surpassed that of the Greeks.
Even conceding the lack of contributions to theory, their practical achievements in engineering and government (which insured centuries of cumulative, if not continuous, peace across a region that spanned three continents) combined with their linguistic and literary legacy from Caesar to Virgil (which spawned the Romance languages and influenced much of western literature) are enough to make equating the Roman period with a dark age hyperbolic at best.
This reminds me of something I've been trying to teach my junior developers: get good at writing graph manipulation code. Graphs show up in a huge number of cases (DOM, file systems (especially with symlinks), relational databases, and that's before getting into anything really fun), so graph manipulation is a skill that pays dividends over a career.
What kind of graph manipulation are you thinking of?
I have the feeling that while graphs are all around us, I have seldom had the need to implement complex operations beyond depth/breadth search, and "harder" things like path finding, cycle detection or topological sort have been much more likely to appear in Advent of Code puzzles than in my professional life.
I sometimes think about how much roads influence our thinking and mental models. They represent abstract structure and organization that we have embedded into the physical world. If someone asked you to draw a map of your hometown, you would probably lean heavily on your knowledge of the road network.
It's interesting to think of the graph of "connected" cities/places inside each of us. If I'm in San Francisco, I know how to get to New York City without any assistance. But there are also roads within blocks of my house that I have no knowledge or understanding of.
It’s pretty incredible to think about. If you live in the US, there are unbroken stretches of asphalt between you and any major city on the continent. All you need is a vehicle (or two legs)
Is that more or less impressive than the equally integrated set of footpaths that once existed? Almost every past footpath has been obliterated by roads and railways. I once knew someone tasked with rediscovering an indigenous trail, with an eye to restoring it. She found the location: right down the median of a divided highway. It turns out that indigenous people didnt like steep hills any more than cars fo.
Even more amazing to me is the unbroken network of copper, fiber, and other data links that let us instantly send information between virtually any two points on the gobe with nothing more than a couple of computers and some electricity.
I feel it's a little different these days with our data. Everything is packetized and we require / have devices along the path so it's no longer literally a single wire from my PC to anywhere else, might hop into different physical mediums along the way even.
If we go back a little to the old POTS and even old alarm systems then I would say that's more true.
There are some exceptions, at least depending on your definition of major city. Juneau, Alaska and its surrounding area aren't connected to the rest of the continental road network, so the only access from outside is by sea or air.
My father in law pulled up beside some holla back in the 1970's to ask the locals if he was on the road to Richmond. The local responded to the enquiry where this road led, and this is legit, "my dear boy, this road leads to everywhere"!
I remember having this realization as a kid. I was standing in my driveway and realized there was an unbroken road from me to the other side of the country (and beyond!). It was one of those the world is so big and so small moments.
I think it's meant to be funny in part because it's almost certainly not literally true. (In some tellings, it could be mocking the rural person who says this for being ignorant of the larger world, or for feeling cut off from it.)
You could also think about borders that are closed. Like if you want to go from Haifa to Beirut, the shortest legal route goes through Jordan and Syria!
Or with the Darien Gap, people asking about how to drive from Panama City to Cartagena might be surprised -- you actually can't get there from there (by road).
Very interesting, none the less.