Ancient Rome and Modern America; A Comparative Study of Morals and Manners

by Guglielmo Ferrero

Greco-Roman antiquity never dreamed that it might be a useful, beautiful, glorious work to invent machines of increasing speed and power, and therefore never gave a thought to those technical elaborations which are the pride of our times. It possessed the elementary machines, the lever, jack-screw, the inclined plane; but it never tried to combine these into more complicated machines. In particular, it never called into play the effort to which all the mechanism of modern times owes its birth; that is to say, it never tried to endow its machines with a more rapid motion than the muscles of men or of animals can endow them with, or to search nature for motive forces of greater power than these. It availed itself only sparingly and on rare occasions of the force of running water or of the wind. The latter it used only for navigation, and even then with regret, hesitation, and fear, as if it were doing an illicit and shameful thing. It knew of no combustible other than the wood of the trees. Notwithstanding the fact that Pliny the elder has preserved for us so much precious information about agriculture and the ancient arts and industries, his writings contain scarcely a single hint suggesting that the men of his civilisation had any desire to make the instruments of economic production more perfect and effective. In one place, the sail, as compared with the oar, inspires him to write a passage in which the modern reader imagines just at first that he has lighted on a sentiment containing a distant echo of contemporary enthusiasm for progress. “Is there a greater marvel in the whole world?” he writes.

A grass exists [flax, of which sails are made] which brings Egypt and Italy so close together that two prefects of Egypt, Galerius and Balbillus, crossed from Alexandria to the straits of Messina, one in seven days and the other in six; and that last summer the senator Valerius Marianus reached Alexandria from Pozzuoli in a light wind in nine days. There is a grass which brings me in seven days from Gades, the harbour near the Pillars of Hercules, to Ostia, in four from this side of Spain, in three from the province of Narbonne, in two from Africa, as C. Flavius, the envoy of the proconsul Vilius Crispus, found.

Does it not seem as if we were reading an anticipation by eighteen hundred years of that hymn which moderns so often raise to the power of steam and to the great ocean liners which cross the Atlantic in five or six days? But ours is only a brief illusion. The wonder and the admiration of Pliny are soon over, and a sort of awe takes their place. “Audax vita, scelerum plena!” he quickly adds. “Creature full of wicked daring!” The invention of sails seems to him almost a sacrilegious impiety, and his view was that of all the ancients.

In short, the few victories which the ancients had won over nature were to them a cause of embarrassment rather than of enthusiasm; for they saw in them merely a proof of the perversity and foolhardiness of human pride. If a contemporary of Sophocles or Horace came back to the world, he would probably just at first be terrified by what he saw all round him, as by the spectacle of a gigantic and unheard-of madness. Machinery, which to us seems the most marvellous instrument of our energy and intelligence, appeared to the ancients a danger, an enemy, and almost a sacrilege: an attempt to rebel against the gods and their wishes. Consequently, they invented and adopted machines—and those but simple and primitive ones—only for use in war, especially for siege-work. The necessity of conquering made them forget to some extent their usual fears.

So great a difference in thought and feeling, in a matter which to us seems of such vital importance, must arise from deep-seated causes. Why did the ancients invent and construct so few machines, and hold in such fear the few they had? Why did they wish the hand of man to be the principal and the most powerful among the instruments of production? Many attribute the inferiority of the ancients in this department to the comparatively undeveloped state of science. Vast and profound knowledge of science, they say, is required for the construction of modern machines. The ancients did not possess this knowledge; therefore, they conclude, they could not construct the machines.

But, in this deduction there are two exaggerations. The services of science, especially in early times, to machines and their progress, are exaggerated; so also is the scientific ignorance of the ancients. Science has helped materially to perfect certain machines, but has actually invented scarcely one. Many of the marvellous machines which, at a giddy rate, multiply riches all round us, have been conceived for the first time in the minds of artisans, contre-maîtres, managers of factories, and other persons more expert in practice than rich in scientific lore. The founder of the great mechanical industry, Arkwright, who invented the cotton-spinning machine, was a barber. Watt, the inventor of the steam-engine, though perhaps a better-educated man than Arkwright, was not in any sense a great scientist. For the rest, whoever knows the history of machinery is aware that science did not begin to concern herself with machinery, or to inquire whether her studies might help inventors with useful suggestions, until the great mechanical industry had already invaded the world. Science, then, only followed a movement which had already begun, and did not give it the first impulse.

Furthermore, the scientific ignorance of the ancients is exaggerated. Ancient science is not so well-known as ancient art and literature; and it certainly did not make very striking progress during the last brilliant period of ancient history—the Roman Empire. Therefore to many, whose knowledge regarding it is comparatively superficial, the ancient world may seem empty of scientific wisdom. But such is not the case. If the Romans never applied much thought to the scientific study of nature, the Greeks for their part had laid the foundations of many sciences, and had laid them boldly and truly. Even the Copernican system had been anticipated by Greek astronomers, like Aristarchus of Samos and Seleucus of Seleucia, who had maintained that the earth revolved round the sun, and that the firmament was much more vast than was generally supposed.

We need not, therefore, believe that the ancients were not able to construct more complicated machines than those they used, because they lacked scientific knowledge. It would be nearer the truth to say that they did not make much effort to raise sciences out of the necessarily narrow domain of purely theoretical problems, because, independent as they were of machinery, they had no need of the practical aids which science, if developed in certain directions, can lend to the construction of machines. In fact, we men of the present day encourage the sciences to search and investigate in every direction and to try every path, not from a disinterested love of the True nor from an intellectual curiosity to spy out the mysteries of nature; but because we hope that we shall discover, in the course of our all-embracing search, laws or bodies or forces which will help us to subdue and exploit nature.

The ancients then abstained from inventing and constructing machines, not from lack of knowledge but from lack of will. The effort seemed to them useless, nay, pernicious; and the enterprise did not attract them. It remains, therefore, to consider why the ancients, in their great struggle to extend the dominion of man over nature, felt no need of help from swift engines of iron, and, therefore, did not make the effort necessary to invent them. This is a question of the highest importance for the history of civilisation, for by its solution only can we gain an insight into what is perhaps the most profound difference between ancient and modern civilisation. The difference consists in this: while our civilisation is a mechanical-scientific civilisation, the ancient was above all things an artistic civilisation. Therefore our civilisation tends in the main to multiply the needs and the consumption of man, so as to quicken production as much as possible, while the ancient civilisation tended to limit man’s needs and consumption, to hold up to esteem and imitation customs of simplicity and parsimony which involved a reduction in consumption, and therefore in production. If we are to grasp the very essence of our history, we must understand clearly how indisolubly united are the artistic civilisation and the ideal of a simple life, the mechanical-scientific civilisation and the ideal of a life of extravagance and luxury.

Even at the present day, many will be found to extol the greatness, the wealth, and the might of the Roman Empire as a marvel never surpassed in history. But this is a delusion. The Roman Empire seemed marvellously wealthy and powerful to the ancients, because they had never yet seen greater wealth and greater might. But what are the wealth and the might of the Roman Empire compared with the might and the wealth of the great modern states of Europe and America? One observation will suffice to give an idea of the difference. We are justified in deducing from the great number of facts and data in our possession that in the most flourishing and wealthy centuries the budget of the Empire, the sum total, that is, of all the items of expenditure which the central government at Rome had to meet—expenditure on the most important public services of so immense an empire, which comprised the whole basin of the Mediterranean, and a large part of Europe, Asia, and Africa—fell short, far short, of the municipal budget of the city of New York. Only the man who is conversant with the customs of the past in their minutest details can fully estimate how much simpler, poorer, and more economical the civilisation of the ancients was than that which has permeated America and Europe since the invention of the steam-engine and electricity, when the riches of the New World, exploited intensively with the help of machinery, began to flood the earth.