Roman engineer schools
- Thread starter Byzantion
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Driftless
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I have some additional questions to flesh out the original idea:
* What time frame for starting the schools?
* What is the impetus for making this commitment?
* Where in the empire would you see them being set up? (Rome, or provinces too)
* Who is eligible to be a student? (Only citizens?)
* What is the core curricula? (what kind of engineering skills to be developed?)
* What time frame for starting the schools?
* What is the impetus for making this commitment?
* Where in the empire would you see them being set up? (Rome, or provinces too)
* Who is eligible to be a student? (Only citizens?)
* What is the core curricula? (what kind of engineering skills to be developed?)
The problem is that the concept of university doesn't jive well with Roman culture. STill, I could see tweo ways that these could emerge:
- informal to formal (like the Roman Empire's medical and legal schools)
- military to civil service
In the first instance, you would start out with a more or less natural accretion of skill in some location. If you wanted to become a physician, you went where the physicians were: to Alexandria, Kos, or Pergamon. Initially, this was a pattern created by happenstance, but it became self-reinforcing. Similarly, if you have a place where a lot of important architects are - Athens, perhaps, or Milan, or Antioch - it will draw students. The workshops of these people will also draw in highly skilled foremen and specialists. In that environment, teaching could easily move from a strictly apprentice-based system to a more flexible contractual pattern where you went to one place for aqueducts, to another for canals, and tfor cranes and pulleys you talked to that guy's foreman.
Architecture and engineering were quite mobile professions in the Roman world, but the most highly regarded could afford to stay in place and send their staff. These are also the people you would go to for instruction, which would provide an extra stream of revenue and prestige. I'm sure they would be interested. By the Late Empire, you could see a degree of standardisation akin to that we see in the medical profession, with particularly respected practitioners granted a rank akin to archiatros (architekton?) and expected to pass or certify others. The adhesive power of tradition, common interest, and lucre would do the rest, and you'd end up with something like an academy.
The students here would be either well-off or well-connected. Instruction would not come cheap, though individual masters could always choose to teach a particularly skilled person for free. I suspect no other form of restriction (the Romans never limited technical professions to citizens, and many very rich people would happily send their slaves to train there).
The second scenario would envision a formalisation of the army's training system. Legion (and fleet) soldiers were sucked into the technical branches quite readily, selected on the basis of connection, talent, and personal preference. A good ear for musical notes was enough to make you an artilleryman. IOTL every legion or fleet base did its own training. I could see, though, that the demands of complex engineering might lead to some kind of centralisation, with soldiers sent to one place or another to study, say, the intricacies of catapult design or the complexities of tunneling.
That centralisation would be important because that way, instead of being turned into specialist units as per OTL, these places would become schools. They might attach to the state-run fabricae (arms manufacturing centres) or to the comitatenses armies, or they could pass over entirely into the civil service structure the same way the army's administrative functions did.
In this case, access would be limited to soldiers. I am sure some men will readily 'do' their sixteen or twenty years in order to come out with the training, but most will look for a career in the forces. The Roman Army was an important skill reservoir for the Empire, and specialists often spent years away from base, often supervising projects that were effectively civilian. If the schools pass into the civil service (formally attached to Legio I and II Adiutrix), the pattern of its offices should assert itself: senior positions filled by time-in-grade, supernumerary and numerary positions sold to interested parties, lots of formal rituals to go through. But the skill base would remain, much as it did in the other branches.
It is important not to overestimate the level of engineering skill in the Roman Empire, BTW. The things we still see are not representative. They still exist because they were built by the best engineers. The shoddy stuff has long collapsed. But contemporary sources paint a pretty hair-raising picture of what damage the average architect could inflict.
- informal to formal (like the Roman Empire's medical and legal schools)
- military to civil service
In the first instance, you would start out with a more or less natural accretion of skill in some location. If you wanted to become a physician, you went where the physicians were: to Alexandria, Kos, or Pergamon. Initially, this was a pattern created by happenstance, but it became self-reinforcing. Similarly, if you have a place where a lot of important architects are - Athens, perhaps, or Milan, or Antioch - it will draw students. The workshops of these people will also draw in highly skilled foremen and specialists. In that environment, teaching could easily move from a strictly apprentice-based system to a more flexible contractual pattern where you went to one place for aqueducts, to another for canals, and tfor cranes and pulleys you talked to that guy's foreman.
Architecture and engineering were quite mobile professions in the Roman world, but the most highly regarded could afford to stay in place and send their staff. These are also the people you would go to for instruction, which would provide an extra stream of revenue and prestige. I'm sure they would be interested. By the Late Empire, you could see a degree of standardisation akin to that we see in the medical profession, with particularly respected practitioners granted a rank akin to archiatros (architekton?) and expected to pass or certify others. The adhesive power of tradition, common interest, and lucre would do the rest, and you'd end up with something like an academy.
The students here would be either well-off or well-connected. Instruction would not come cheap, though individual masters could always choose to teach a particularly skilled person for free. I suspect no other form of restriction (the Romans never limited technical professions to citizens, and many very rich people would happily send their slaves to train there).
The second scenario would envision a formalisation of the army's training system. Legion (and fleet) soldiers were sucked into the technical branches quite readily, selected on the basis of connection, talent, and personal preference. A good ear for musical notes was enough to make you an artilleryman. IOTL every legion or fleet base did its own training. I could see, though, that the demands of complex engineering might lead to some kind of centralisation, with soldiers sent to one place or another to study, say, the intricacies of catapult design or the complexities of tunneling.
That centralisation would be important because that way, instead of being turned into specialist units as per OTL, these places would become schools. They might attach to the state-run fabricae (arms manufacturing centres) or to the comitatenses armies, or they could pass over entirely into the civil service structure the same way the army's administrative functions did.
In this case, access would be limited to soldiers. I am sure some men will readily 'do' their sixteen or twenty years in order to come out with the training, but most will look for a career in the forces. The Roman Army was an important skill reservoir for the Empire, and specialists often spent years away from base, often supervising projects that were effectively civilian. If the schools pass into the civil service (formally attached to Legio I and II Adiutrix), the pattern of its offices should assert itself: senior positions filled by time-in-grade, supernumerary and numerary positions sold to interested parties, lots of formal rituals to go through. But the skill base would remain, much as it did in the other branches.
It is important not to overestimate the level of engineering skill in the Roman Empire, BTW. The things we still see are not representative. They still exist because they were built by the best engineers. The shoddy stuff has long collapsed. But contemporary sources paint a pretty hair-raising picture of what damage the average architect could inflict.
I find the question of the impetus of creating an institutional frame for engineering skills particularly intriguing. Carlton Bach has already pointed out some important motivations that might lead to such commitments ("tradition, common interest, lucre"), but I wonder whether such a school could also foster a sense of innovation and technological progress that otherwise does not seem to have been a concept IOTL.
Two very interesting models. I wonder whether the second model, in which complex engineering leads to centralized institutions, would create incentives for technological innovation. As the institutions pass over into civil hands and become a lucrative business, wouldn't that create competition between the schools, creating tiers of more prestigious schools? They might compete for state funds or raise the prestige of certain provinces. This might raise the standards of the professions to a degree which, as you point out, really was not there IOTL. This might have required a generally more socially mobile society, though. Also, engineering schools, whether they develop from civil or military origins, would probably not change the lack of incentives to innovate building and engineering outside of prestigious projects. So my further question would be: How would Roman Society develop a widespread dynamic of technological innovation?