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How are Rome's monuments still standing?

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Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?

#121

Post by finiteseries »

trompetenaccoun wrote: post #106
rurp wrote: post #57

Tangentially related to this, one of my hobbies is to explore old long abandoned ghost towns and mining camps in the Southwest US. It is really impressive how well many of these structures have held up in harsh climates. One of my favorite parts is seeing how repairs were improvised in the wilderness using whatever supplies happened to be available. The standard approach to trash back then was to throw it in a pile n…

Are there really sites undisturbed enough for you to see how they did repairs or disposed of their trash? That sounds amazing. SW-America is definitely on my bucket list and I love ghost towns. In Western Europe it's hard to find any abandoned place older than a couple of years that's preserved well. I guess it's because the next city is never very far and there's always uncultured idiots whose idea of fun it is to v…

You’re in for a treat, it’s within a timescale of 200 years or so, but definitely. The climate, terrain, distances, ownership, and uselessness of most of the land involved really encourage preservation, albeit rotted out and rusting.

Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?

#122

Post by Archelaos »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #89

It's struck me, reading roman authors, that they were considerably more obsessed with building a legacy than we are. Not just getting powerful or famous in life, but entering the history books, to become big name like Scipio Africanus. May be that it comes with living in an "eternal" city that's been the same as long as anyone can remember, with generations coming and going and most human activity washed away like sa…

Being obsessed with building a legacy is not so uncommon. Machiavelli comes into my mind, for whom future fame is one of the most important motivations for rulers. Or think of Pericles, who states in his famous Funeral Oration: "there are mighty monuments of our power which will make us the wonder of this and of succeeding ages".[1]

[1] http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/education/thucydides.html

Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?

#123

Post by yesenadam »

WalterBright wrote: post #83
SQueeeeeL wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jonathan Blow makes a bunch of great points about our simplified view of ancient people, versus the reality of their complex achievements which could only be brought about by lots of ingenuity and iterations. https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk

The lack of writing probably impaired things greatly. I know the Romans had writing. But did they ever write manuals? It was not like Gutenberg's printing press, which put progress on a steep upward trend.

Not sure what you have in mind with "manuals", but I believe there were treatises on every subject, e.g. Vitruvius' On architecture (~20BC), "a guide for building projects. As the only treatise on architecture to survive from antiquity, it has been regarded since the Renaissance as the first book on architectural theory, as well as a major source on the canon of classical architecture. It contains a variety of information on Greek and Roman buildings, as well as prescriptions for the planning and design of military camps, cities, and structures both large (aqueducts, buildings, baths, harbours) and small (machines, measuring devices, instruments)"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_architectura

Ptolemy (100-170AD) wrote treatises on many subjects, and his works on astronomy and geography "never ceased to be copied or commented upon, both in Late Antiquity and in the Middle Ages" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptolemy

Vegetius wrote a military manual On military matters, extremely influential until about 1500.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetius

Apicius wrote On the Subject of Cooking, a cook book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apicius

(So much ancient writing hasn't survived, e.g. none of Aristotle's many writings survived - what we know as his writings are just his students' lecture notes.)

Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?

#124

Post by Archelaos »

CubsFan1060 wrote: post #88
pmontra wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Pantheon is maintained but the Colosseum is not and it shows. The interior of the Colosseum is a pile of rocks. However there is a plan to restore the floor https://www.stirworld.com/see-news-rome-announces-plans-for-...

It is very interesting. Certainly there are holes where people have stolen iron. But more importantly, the materials in the Colosseum are massively pillaged by christians for use in other buildings. The Pantheon was turned into a church, and thus was off limits. In Rome they call it "recycling". An interesting article: https://engineeringrome.org/ancient-structures-in-rome-the-c...

The Pantheon was not completely off limits. Pope Urban VIII. (Maffeo Barberini, pontificat 1623-1644) had the bronze cladding of the Pantheon taken down to have 80 canons cast from it. He has had a cover-up story spread that the bronze was used for St. Peter's Basilica.

Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?

#127

Post by brendoelfrendo »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #89

It's struck me, reading roman authors, that they were considerably more obsessed with building a legacy than we are. Not just getting powerful or famous in life, but entering the history books, to become big name like Scipio Africanus. May be that it comes with living in an "eternal" city that's been the same as long as anyone can remember, with generations coming and going and most human activity washed away like sa…

I read on here - and I hope someone can find the link because I just spent 20 minutes looking for it and now I can't find it - an economist or similar academic grousing about a rail bridge in the UK that had been upgraded for the first time in an [arbitrarily long amount of time] to support heavier trains. The complaint was that, surely, a bridge should not last that long without needing an upgrade; you should build a cheaper bridge and replace it, because whatever gains you can make from investing the difference will outpace the replacement cost.

I guess the point is that building a legacy of infrastructure is, generally, not economical and therefore should be foregone in favor of building a legacy of financial holdings.

Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?

#128

Post by trompetenaccoun »

finiteseries wrote: post #121
trompetenaccoun wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there really sites undisturbed enough for you to see how they did repairs or disposed of their trash? That sounds amazing. SW-America is definitely on my bucket list and I love ghost towns. In Western Europe it's hard to find any abandoned place older than a couple of years that's preserved well. I guess it's because the next city is never very far and there's always uncultured idiots whose idea of fun it is to v…

You’re in for a treat, it’s within a timescale of 200 years or so, but definitely. The climate, terrain, distances, ownership, and uselessness of most of the land involved really encourage preservation, albeit rotted out and rusting.

Rotted out and rusting is beautiful, I love it. Next best thing to getting a time machine and going back :)

Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?

#129

Post by hattmall »

pengaru wrote: post #102
emodendroket wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every climate brings its own challenges, of course, but it still seems true that that's better than dealing with constant precipitation, freezing, and so on.

If we're talking about the PNW, it doesn't take a genius to look around and see nature alone manages to build towering long-lasting structures in that environment. Some of those redwood trees are older than the oldest buildings in the entire nation. The desert's evolved long-lasting structures are shrub-sized and endure by retreating underground. Otherwise there's rocks.

Big difference in the tree living vs being dead..

The desert is very harsh for life, but much more gentle on structures. Even when it does rain the arid environment evaporates it away quickly.

It's not even a close comparison, you find structures from the 1960s in the southeast that are far more deteriorated than ones from the 1860s in the southwest.

Re: How are Rome's monuments still standing?

#130

Post by WalterBright »

yesenadam wrote: post #123
WalterBright wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lack of writing probably impaired things greatly. I know the Romans had writing. But did they ever write manuals? It was not like Gutenberg's printing press, which put progress on a steep upward trend.

Not sure what you have in mind with "manuals", but I believe there were treatises on every subject, e.g. Vitruvius' On architecture (~20BC), "a guide for building projects. As the only treatise on architecture to survive from antiquity, it has been regarded since the Renaissance as the first book on architectural theory, as well as a major source on the canon of classical architecture. It contains a variety of inform…

The fact that any books would have to be copied by hand would disastrously limit their spread and influence. How many people could learn calculus if only 5 copies of the textbook were created?

So many being lost is an inevitable consequence of very very few copies ever existing.

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