An Overture to The Oxford Handbook: Serafina Cuomo, Technology and Culture in Greek and Roman Antiquity
Serafina Cuomo produced her thoughtful but somewhat quirky book at an opportune moment.1 It not only offers a timely recognition of the ever increasing popularity of the subject of ancient technology, but it is also a serious attempt to correct its long marginalization and to acknowledge all that it has to contribute to an understanding of ancient culture itself.
Until recently, the amateur enthusiast was hard-pressed to find a suitably detailed survey of any of the issues surrounding ancient technology or engineering. With the recent publication of The Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World, edited by John Peter Oleson (2008), all that has changed. It is especially important to read Cuomo’s book as an overture to the symphony that is the Oxford handbook, since many of the most critical points she makes about ancient technology are made again in different contexts and with different evidence in the handbook. (Cuomo contributed the opening chapter to the handbook, “Ancient Written Sources for Engineering and Technology.”)
Cuomo’s own book has an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion, and, while all the sections have some relationship to each other, they are also quite distinct essays on very diverse topics that can be read separately. The introduction grapples with: the surprising pervasiveness of technology in the classical world; how the Greek word techne, and its Latin equivalent ars, covered a much wider spectrum of meanings than modern technologies, including among “qualified technicians,” for example, carpenters, doctors, and even rhetoricians; and how few people have studied ancient technology, although that changed in the year since her book was published. She is quite vocal in her criticism of the two approaches that, in her view, have marred the historiography of ancient technology and are to blame for its relative neglect: the “blocage question,” which suggests that something “blocked” or prevented the ancient mind from making connections between technology and the economy; and the “mainstream view” which argues practitioners of technology were marginalized and widely despised in ancient society. Because Plato and Aristotle expressed this latter “mainstream view,” it has tended to dominate. Cuomo then proposes her series of case studies as an exercise in writing the history of ancient technology. She looks for particular types of sources or she approaches certain sources in a way that reveals their special angles.
Many of the points in the introduction are taken up in more detail in the following chapters. Chapter 1, “The Definition of Techne in Classical Athens,” considers the practice of ancient medicine in a wide variety of ancient texts from the fifth to the first century BCE. In the end, Cuomo’s attempt to define techne in classical Greece does not produce a unified result. She manages to establish some of the characteristics of techne—how it involves chance, how it is teachable, how it precipitates dramatic changes in society, although sometimes with moral ambiguity and strong political resonance—and she even identifies some disciplines as technai. Cuomo also notes that there was competition for techne, attempts on several sides to appropriate and control competing forms of knowledge, and that these were mirrored in the competitiveness of the political arena. She succeeds in demonstrating the complex place that technology held in ancient Athens, and that views about it were not homogeneous, not even within one individual author. She effectively argues that to understand techne, we must learn to appreciate the ongoing, dynamic negotiation between elite and nonelite notions about it.
The case study of chapter 2, “The Hellenistic Military Revolution,” takes a big leap in time and topic for a particular focus on techne and its impact on ancient society. Cuomo sees the rise of a new world leader in the Hellenistic period, along with a new type of war and warrior, embodied by the Romans as described by Polybius (p. 74). She considers the introduction of the catapult not so much the end of manly virtue, but the redefinition of the virtues necessary to be a man—which now must include mastery of military technology.
Chapter 3, “Death and the Craftsman,” focuses on carpentry and concentrates on funerary and non-funerary monuments of the first century of the Empire to offer a detailed iconographical study of one technical instrument, the libella, or carpenter’s square. Cuomo argues that the practitioners of technology in this period used an instrument, the libella, as their emblem of technical knowledge. Technical knowledge explicitly implied the ability to make something out of material rather than to make something literary. The famous mosaic (originally used as a tabletop in an outdoor dining room from Pompeian house I.5.2) with a skull perched on top of a libella can suggest death is the great equalizer (p. 99). The values of some Roman technicians, in other words, were at odds with those of the upper classes. Carpenters, at least, were proud of their activities, strongly identified with them (hence the frequent presence of the libella), and celebrated their technical knowledge openly.
Cuomo jumps to the third century and the technology of land surveying in chapter 4, “Boundary Disputes in the Roman Empire,” for examples of what one can learn from archaeological and epigraphical sources respectively. And finally, chapter 5, “Architects of Late Antiquity,” spans a vast expanse of time, from about the third to about the sixth century CE, and is an embryonic attempt at a big-picture history of ancient technology based on the integration of textual and material evidence. We learn how Justinian reasserted his proximity to God and to the building celebrating him by being a better architect than the architects themselves (p. 164).
The conclusion asserts that the book is “unfinished,” and this is accurate in many ways. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 really do just scratch the surface of the masses of epigraphic and archaeological evidence available to us. The iconography of other funerary symbols (the ship or the compass, to name two), whole groups of technical practitioners (smiths, bakers, fullers, farmers), or evidence for technicians from one locality (Ostia, Rome, Gallia Narbonensis) over a particular period of time all remain to be explored. The foregoing, however, is a modest scholarly quibble with a book that consciously tries to avoid scholarly pretensions.
Cuomo’s case studies bring us fruitfully to several serious realizations: ancient technicians themselves seemed proud of their accomplishments, even though the elite sometimes tried to marginalize them, and this marginalization has been compounded by modern historians who have chosen certain representations of ancient society as more relevant or truthful than others; wider political and social issues related to fear or mistrust of technical knowledge were at play in the ancient marginalization of technicians; and many voices emerge from our sources so that someone’s view on ancient technology is always just that, a view—coming from somewhere and involving societal needs, constraints, and power balances relevant to a particular time and place. Cuomo presents a thoughtful set of questions and attempts accurate and balanced answers to them, and in this she succeeds admirably. For those who wish to investigate ancient technology further, this book would be an excellent place to start.
1 Serafina Cuomo, Technology and Culture in Greek and Roman Antiquity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. xi+212, $80).
Copyright© 2009, the Society for the History of Technology
Filed under: Vol. 50 No. 2 (April 2009)
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