[WalterBright]

The Romans did not have the printing press. The press produced a sharp exponential increase in technological progress.

Without the press, the spread of new ideas and techniques is extremely slow, and there isn't much cross-pollination of technologies. Worse, an awful lot gets forgotten.

[smhinsey]

The more you think about it, the more impressive it is that they maintained such a far-flung and orderly bureaucracy (relatively speaking) without the printing press.

[metageek]

What's special about the printing press is that it makes copying cheap; the comparable Roman technology was slavery, which makes labor cheap. (In the short term.)

[watchandwait]

Slavery was present in every ancient society. The Roman empire was successful because of superior military tactics and world class fortification and infrastructure engineering-- especially roads and agriculture.

Additionally, the Romans had organizational advantages in an advanced legal and commercial code. The Romans were also extremely flexible and combined conquered local traditions with their own (Roman paganism was particularly tolerant) and by expanding Roman citizenship in ever broader circles.

[smhinsey]

That makes it even more remarkable, really, because the investment required to avoid automation is incredible. You need schools to prepare slaves as teachers (taught by slaves, of course) to teach child slaves to read and write and whatever specialist skills required by scribes. You need schools to teach the kids to read and you need slaves to produce sufficient excess food to support all the other slaves. And at the end of the day, you end up with a highly literate population of slaves in the middle of Rome, posing a significant risk to stability. Either that or they were massively efficient in their reliance on written material, which in itself would be remarkable in light of how successful they were in exporting their culture throughout the empire.

This is a great example of where the mindset of the ancient civilization is just so dramatically different than our own that it's difficult to understand their motivations.

[watchandwait]

The vast majority of Roman slaves were miserable, illiterate war captives, and generations of their offspring, working large scale farms in Italy. The instability from Roman slavery actually came from the masses of displaced Roman yeoman farmers, who could not compete with the slave agribusinesses. This was a considerable concern in ancient Rome, for cultural reasons and also because these small farmers formed the backbone of the Roman legionary forces during the Republic.

[smhinsey]

Right, and to be clear, I am addressing the scenario from the Roman perspective, not because I approve of it or whatever. Additionally, I am highlighting the notion that in order to mass produce written law and the other things necessary to successfully export a culture on massive scale over large distances, you actually do need a large population of literate slaves, which, if you're going to have slaves, is the last thing you want.

Edit: to clarify, slaves are necessary to export culture because someone has to transcribe all of the books and laws etc.

[watchandwait]

Slavery didn't export or transmit Roman culture as much as Roman citizens and traders settling conquered lands, and mixing with local elites, who adopted Roman traditions, economics, and lifestyles.

My reading of the history is that the literate Roman slaves more-or-less bought in to the system-- indeed, for the literate slave, there were paths to freedom, and some of the most trusted imperial advisers were freedmen. While slave uprisings were always a huge concern in Rome, they played no part in the eventual downfall of Rome, and the most remembered one-- Spartacus-- was of the illiterate war captive type of slave.

[bzbarsky]

Why would literate slaves pose a risk to stability, necessarily?

Keep in mind that slavery for these people was nothing like the chattel slavery of the US south. Being an educated slave did mean that you had some restrictions on what you could do; it also freed you from having to worry about food and shelter, say. Similar tradeoffs have been made by salaried workers in Japan in the 70s and throughout the Western world during the industrial revolution

And even the restrictions part was ... varied. If you're a slave and your owner lives in Athens while you live in a Greek city on the Bosporus and supervise your owners business interests in the Black Sea (an actual example I recall from some of the primary sources from my Greek history classes in college), you really don't have much in the way of restrictions on you. Yes, legally you're a slave. So what? It has very little impact on your day-to-day life, at least as long as business is good.

[smhinsey]

I don't think that it's a necessity, but we're talking about the Romans, who are pretty notoriously paranoid about security issues since Rome was sacked by the Gauls. This concern seems in line with what I know of the general attitude of the average Roman citizen, especially if you're talking about slaves that came from the outer provinces, as most did in later years.

I just don't think you can ever be totally secure psychologically while you own slaves, but as I said elsewhere in this thread, there are a lot of things about the Roman mindset that are very difficult for the modern mind to identify with, so at best, this is marginally informed speculation on my part.

[Gormo]

This is begging the question in a way, though. Why didn't the Romans have the printing press? Like the hot-air balloon, the concept of printing is clear and simple, and the technological prerequisites are minimal - you just need metallurgy, which the Romans had in abundance.

The printing press ended up being developed in a culture that was in many ways less technically sophisticated than the Romans'.

[EdiX]

I vaguely remember that this has to do with more with the paper than with printing technology, the paper being very expensive until recently.

[katovatzschyn]

I cannot find the source but I remember the same also. As well, "printing press like" techniques were used early in clay pot design and marking, again can't find source, which is the essence of the idea. Only it could not expand to the scale required of modern printing press standards.

[gwern]

> Like the hot-air balloon, the concept of printing is clear and simple, and the technological prerequisites are minimal - you just need metallurgy, which the Romans had in abundance.

More details: the Antithykera Mechanism would seem to imply that the Romans had the metallurgy.

Interestingly, they or their predecessors also may have had the basic idea of block printing or movable type printing. The Phaistos Disc (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos_Disc) from ancient Crete is a disc of fired clay onto which various symbols have been 'stamped'.

Set the symbols into a frame or carve them into a flat wooden block, and keep using clay as your printing material... Not as good as Chinese paper or Egyptian papyrus, but still better than scribes.

[pbhjpbhj]

With wax tablets being used it's surprising too if none of the Romans thought to use an impression mechanism¹ to print with.

--

1 - Perhaps drawing initially on foil, backing with clay, heat and press and then wipe over an "ink" (which could also then be set on to paper). Or maybe simply forming letter shapes which are put together on a board and heating and impressing them in to the wax.

Indeed this brings me to think how easy duplication of clay tablets bearing cuneiform would be – impress a fired/set tablet on to a piece of wet clay, set that as the master and then "potato print" with that in to fresh clay pieces. It couldn’t really be simpler than that – why didn’t the Sumerians have printing presses in 4000BC?.

[00010]

Printing, as a technology for creating duplicate images (eg, with wood blocks), was in use at least a millenium prior to Gutenberg in many societies, including parts of late Rome. Moveable type came much later, and it was Gutenberg's incorporation of this with a whole slew of engineering improvements that led to the printing revolution in Europe.

[pbhjpbhj]

Perhaps I should have done some research before opening my fat mouth ... but duplicate images only or was it extended to duplicate "written" works?

Ex post facto lots of this sort of thing (block printing images -> movable type) seem pretty straight forward, doesn't it.

[00010]

I think one of the hallmarks of any truly revolutionary technology is the ease and speed with which it spreads, becomes assimilated, and soon seems 'obvious' to those who were born after its adoption. The wheel being the archetypal example.

I'm no expert on printing presses, but the Wikipedia page on Moveable Type has some good material, including the suggestion that Gutenberg's most important innovation was a greatly improved method for casting letters. I find the elegance of this quite inspiring -- that Gutenberg did not invent 'the printing press' out of thin air but rather made this seemingly minor, but in fact absolutely crucial improvement that almost immediately propelled it from a niche technology into a cornerstone of intellectual life. There are many contemporary parallels...

(Incidentally, printing's rapid adoption was surely in part due to its usefulness not just for intellectuals, but also for the ever-present propaganda efforts of government officials.)

[WalterBright]

Printing supported not only governments, but revolutions. I have a hard time believing the American Revolution could remotely have happened without the printing press.

Consider the modern parallel of the Egyptian Revolution being enabled by Facebook.

[philwelch]

Incidentally, printing's rapid adoption was surely in part due to its usefulness not just for intellectuals, but also for the ever-present propaganda efforts of government officials.

Not to mention the ability to print bibles, which was pretty important at the time.

[wazoox]

In fact much revolutionary technologies come from small incremental improvements, and often were invented by several people at the same time : the telephone, the radio, the steam engine, television...

[dwiel]

Just a thought, but paper is a much more information dense medium. Perhaps transportation of the clay tablets was expensive enough to make doing them by hand each time easier than printing them.

[pbhjpbhj]

Indeed, but clay tablets could have been thinned, they could also have used organic material (with fired pieces it burns away, cf paper-clay) to lighten the resulting tablets without much loss in ruggedness (paperclay is stronger than clay alone, like concrete vs cement).

I think such a development would lead naturally to think "damn this epic of Gilgamesh needs a few camels to transport, perhaps instead of impressing back in to clay I can press it on something lighter" and then possibly with the realisation that pressing on a damp cloth with an unfired tablet impression produces a great serviceable print ...

[gte910h]

Romans had paper/papyrus by the late republic period (Caesar, Antony, Cicero, Cleopatra)