Technical Innovation and Economic Progress in the Ancient World

I t is a commonplace that the Greeks and Romans together added little to the world's store of technical knowledge and equipment. The Neolithic and Bronze Ages between them invented or discovered, and then developed, the essential processes of agriculture, metallurgy, pottery, and textile-making. With these the Greeks and Romans built a high civilization, full of power and intellect and beauty, but they transmitted to their successors few new inventions. The gear and the screw, the rotary mill and the water-mill, the direct screwpress, glass-blowing and concrete, hollow bronze-casting, the dioptra for surveying, the torsion catapult, the water-clock and water organ, automata (mechanical toys) driven by water and wind and steam this short list is fairly exhaustive, and it adds up to not very much for a great civilization over fifteen hundred years. Paradoxically, there was both more and less technical progress in the ancient world than the standard picture reveals. There was more, provided we avoid the mistake of hunting solely for great radical inventions and we also look at developments within the limits of the traditional techniques. There was less far less if we avoid the reverse mistake and look not merely for the appearance of an invention, but also for the extent of its employment. Foodprocessing offers a neat illustration of each. In the two centuries between I50 B.C. and 50 A.D. (in very round numbers) there was continuous improvement in the wine and oil presses used on the Roman latifundia. I am not referring to the screw-press, but to such advances as refinements in the shape of the millstones and their cores, by which craftsmen made presses more efficient and more manageable.1 Somewhere in this same period the water-mill was invented, and this must rank as a radical invention permitting the replacement of muscular power, human or animal, by water power. But for the next three centuries its use was so sporadic that the total effect was very slight.2 In agriculture there was an accumulation of empirical knowledge about plants and fertilizers. But there was no selective breeding (of plants or animals), no noticeable change in tools or techniques, whether of ploughing or exploiting the soil or harvesting or irrigating. There were repeated shifts in the uses of