[HN Gopher] Ancient Rome's failed building projects
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       Ancient Rome's failed building projects
        
       Author : diodorus
       Score  : 47 points
       Date   : 2024-02-16 19:29 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.historytoday.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.historytoday.com)
        
       | visarga wrote:
       | Never ceases to amaze me how advanced Romans were for their time.
        
         | inglor_cz wrote:
         | Especially considering that they had no engines to speak of.
         | Everything on dry land was moved around by human or animal
         | muscles. All the stones, pillars and concrete had to be lifted
         | manually.
        
           | delichon wrote:
           | A large fraction of that workforce was enslaved, and it's not
           | accidental that the terminology has descended into engine
           | jargon, like master & slave cylinders, clocks, drives, etc.
           | We have replaced the fleshy engines of the ancients with
           | inorganic ones to the general benefit. I hope that's a good
           | portent for the replacement of us fleshy knowledge engines by
           | AI.
        
             | lisper wrote:
             | Difference being that knowledge work can actually be fun.
        
               | EarthLaunch wrote:
               | Physical work can be fun too!
               | 
               | Neither as much when you're a slave of course.
        
               | whynotminot wrote:
               | To me the difference seems to come in with "mass
               | industrialization" or de-personalization.
               | 
               | I'm growing my own backyard vegetables? Challenging but
               | rewarding. I'm part of massive factory farming? Less
               | enthused.
               | 
               | I think this can be generalized across a lot of
               | industries, and I think it boils down to our human need
               | to feel like we're more than just a small cog.
        
             | graemep wrote:
             | The first part if true: Romans did depend on slavery, as
             | did most ancient societies.
             | 
             | I am less convinced that engine jargon is derived from
             | that. Where the terminology is master and slave
             | specifically, yes, but not necessarily in slave societies.
             | Where the terminology is master and something other than
             | slave, I do not think so.
             | 
             | Slave is pretty unambiguous. Master less so. To a middle
             | aged British bloke like myself the strongest association of
             | master that I grew up with was "male school teacher".
             | Master craftsman is also a significant association.
        
       | lifeisstillgood wrote:
       | >>> An architect, when he has received the commission for some
       | public work, promises in advance what the cost is to be.
       | 
       | After 2,000 years surely we should have found a more realistic
       | means of judging projects and success than the upfront
       | guesstimate ...
        
         | duxup wrote:
         | Human nature is hard to avoid.
        
         | samus wrote:
         | In the face of scope creep, changing requirements,
         | unforeseeable external factors, and purely human factors (like
         | corruption, incompetence, neglect, internal rivalries, etc.),
         | projects always faced huge risks. Projects nowadays are vastly
         | bigger in scope (perhaps unnecessarily so), but the usual
         | mechanisms to control the inefficiencies of bureaucracies are
         | not easy to scale up.
        
         | mulmen wrote:
         | How are you sure there is a better method than the educated
         | guess? We have sophisticated methods of guessing and risk
         | mitigation but I don't believe there's a fundamentally
         | different approach.
        
         | arccy wrote:
         | instead we have cost plus contracts
        
       | seagreen wrote:
       | Link to the mentioned section of De Architectura by Vitruvius:
       | https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20239/20239-h/20239-h.htm#Pa...
        
       | Simon_ORourke wrote:
       | The article itself is a bit light on actual specifics, but
       | perhaps the ancient literature is less inclined to write about
       | some project out in the provinces that didn't quite come off as
       | planned, versus some of the eye-watering stuff they actually
       | accomplished. I've not read Suetonius for a good 20 years or
       | more, but I vaguely remember some piece where he recounts about
       | having the engineering saavy to flood the amphitheatre in Rome to
       | host mock naval battles. Well mock battles in the sense that the
       | poor guys actually fighting and dying are only doing "pretend"
       | battles, but you know what I mean.
        
         | golergka wrote:
         | A lot of ancient writers didn't shy away from writing awful
         | things about emperors. You could say that it was for propaganda
         | purposes of their successors, but regardless of their motives,
         | why wouldn't they write about their construction failures as
         | well?
        
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       (page generated 2024-02-18 23:00 UTC)