In this splendid follow-up to Ancient Mathematics (London, 2001), Serafina Cuomo turns her attention to technology, a subject that is often considered to be on the opposite end of the spectrum of the history of ancient science. However, just as Cuomo earlier demonstrated that the history of Graeco-Roman mathematics was far richer and far more socially embedded than traditional accounts have presented it, here she shows that ancient technology is similarly susceptible to contextual analysis, and that the results are rewarding and often surprising.
Like Ancient Mathematics, this book is organized chronologically, with a short historiographical introduction and a reflective conclusion flanking the five main chapters. It concludes with an invaluable bibliographical essay as well as a traditional bibliography and a brief index. It is not a comprehensive survey of the current state of the field – that can be found in the magisterial Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World (ed. John Peter Oleson, Oxford, 2008). Whereas Oleson exhaustively divides the subject technology by technology (so, tunnels and canals, coinage, information technologies and so on), Cuomo uses five very different case studies to play with different historiographical approaches and to consider ‘how technical knowledge, activities and products were perceived and represented by the people involved’, because ‘any evidence we have comes through the filter of [ancient and modern] perceptions and representations – attitudes – to technology’ (p. 3).
The introduction criticizes two hitherto prevalent attitudes to Graeco-Roman technology: the blocage assumption, which bemoans the ancients' apparent inability to fulfil the potential of their technological innovations, and the ‘mainstream’ view, which legitimates the marginalization of technology in ancient history by claiming that the ancients denigrated it too. The rest of the book brilliantly demonstrates the inadequacies and fallacies inherent in both.
Chapter 1, ‘The definition of techne in classical Athens’, looks at attitudes to medicine as technical knowledge in the fifth and fourth centuries BC. Cuomo persuasively shows that ‘the main characteristics associated with techne and technicians – the ability to precipitate change and the ability to produce the useful and necessary – were by some perceived as dangerous and threatening to what we could call an aristocratic social order’ (p. 39). In Chapter 2, ‘The Hellenistic military revolution’, she examines technological innovation in antiquity by looking at the newly invented catapult and the concomitant realignment of knowledge, training and ethics of warfare in the last four centuries BC. She concludes, ‘as well as the military leaders taking on characteristics associated with techne, there are indications that the professional soldier and even the military technician absorbed virtues typically associated with the noble warrior’ (p. 74).
The first two chapters listen carefully to the voices in a wide variety of written sources. By contrast, Chapter 3, ‘Death and the craftsman’, focuses on material evidence to access the mental and social worlds of non-literate practitioners. Here Cuomo examines the self-images of carpenters and their instruments on ‘increasingly expensive and visible’ Roman funerary monuments from the first century BC to the second century AD. In a conclusion that has important repercussions far beyond her immediate concerns, she reminds us that ‘ancient technicians were not invisible to themselves or to their immediate peers’ but their apparent invisibility is ‘a consequence of selective blindness on the part of some observers, both ancient and modern’ (p. 102). Chapter 4, ‘Boundary disputes in the Roman Empire’, contrasts self-presentations of land-surveyors in their technical writings and inscriptions with their portrayals by literary writers such as Seneca and Livy. For the latter, surveyors were ‘guilty participants in the decline of humankind’, while the practitioners themselves believed they were ‘agents of rationality, in tune with the cosmos, but also bound by the necessities of negotiating diverse customers and masters’ (p. 130).
Finally, in Chapter 5, ‘Architects of late antiquity’, Cuomo addresses the changing role and status of technicians arising from the spread of Christianity in the Mediterranean world from the third century AD. Christianity brought new power structures and hierarchies into conflict with traditional political power, so that the financing, location, appearance and management of religious building became ‘a potential battleground’ between Church and state (p. 161). Architects became central figures in that spiritual warfare, designing churches as ‘an image of the ordered universe created by God’ (p. 155).
My Islamic art-historian partner snatched this book away from me mid-review, initially interested in the late antique architects, but then refused to give it back until he had devoured it all. This is not a common event in our household; it speaks volumes for Cuomo's ability to communicate far beyond her intended audience. She writes with an assured grasp of an enormous array of primary sources, and an evident fascination for and engagement with the people, objects and ideas she is discussing. She is also skilled in bringing out the complexities and complications of her material while never despairing of finding a clear route through. Like the ancient technicians, Cuomo has amply demonstrated ‘the ability to precipitate change and the ability to produce the useful and necessary’. But even if you are an Athenian aristocrat, there is no need to feel threatened by this book and every reason to enjoy the new ways of thinking about past technologies that Cuomo so engagingly offers.
