Although largely unnoticed today, technology was an integral part of ancient life. Some of it is obvious when one stops to think about it, other technologies were well hidden (often by design), and still others pass by undetected partly because people do not think of them as technologies that were invented and developed by the people who used them. For instance, in the obvious category, almost every classical house contained wool-working equipment and loom, to make the clothes on people’s backs, and oven and hearth, to cook every grain they consumed. In addition, the typical house contained things that were the result of a variety of different technologies, such as furniture, baskets and mats, pots and pans, jewelry, and metalwork, such as weapons, plate, and coin. An example of technology in the hidden category occurs in the story of the emperor Hadrian’s design for a temple of Venus and Roma, which incorporated machines of an unspecified type. Apollodoros, an architect and engineer who had bridged the Danube and superintended the construction of Trajan’s column, criticized the plans because he thought that the machines could have been accommodated unseen in a basement, had Hadrian included one (Dio 69.4.4). The professional architect Apollodoros would have rendered the machines invisible - perhaps to enhance the wonder of visitors, who thereby would have seen the result achieved by them, without seeing the means by which it was achieved. What exactly the machines were or were for remains an open question. Another case of a hidden technology is metal plating, whereby a variety of techniques were used to produce a thin coat of a precious metal over an object made of base metal, e. g. coins in the later Roman empire (Vlachou-Mogire 2006). An example of a technology that does not normally leap to mind as a technology is writing (Teffeteller 2006). It is debatable what proportion of the population at any particular time and place in antiquity could and did read and write on a regular basis, but a number of institutions and practices worked on the assumption that people could do it, e. g. the Athenian legal system, writing rude words on slingshot, and inscribing gravestones.
A Companion to Ancient History Edited by Andrew Erskine © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-13150-6
World History
