Faeelin
Banned
I think we need to be leery of generalizations like this. Charlemagne went to great lengths to increase literacy in his empire.
Roman Printing Press
- Thread starter Tjakari
- Start date
I think we need to be leery of generalizations like this. Charlemagne went to great lengths to increase literacy in his empire.
True, but not among the general population. He established schools to create a literate clergy, and it's fair to say that even then his efforts were a brief flutter of candlelight amid a general gloom of illiteracy of those times.
Lucius Verus
Banned
The thing was the best they did was really wrought iron quality, there's a fine distinction between something pure and easy to manipulate like gold compared to the guesswork chemistry and furnace design needed for durable alloys; the degree of purification and knowledge of elemental compositions just wasn't available at the time. Sure you can make wrought iron presses which will probably brittle, but to make them fine enough for printing while at the same time durable enough to pay its cost is rather difficult. Generally speaking, steel and alloys aren't needed when Rome's enemies didn't have much better and they are a few centuries away from it at least.
But you really don't need much steel or iron for a printing press. Almost all the moveable parts are hardwood. Roman craftsmen were able to produce catapult frames that could handle torsion stresses of several tons and balanced finely enough to launch projectiles with minimal deviation. THey would not have had a problem making a printing press, which is really quite a simple machine.
The type would have been the bigger problem (it's not just lead - too soft - but an alloy involving, among other things, antimony). Roman metallurgy tended to work with the native properties of metals from specific sources, so it's likely that could have been overcome by sourcing the hardest lead they could find. And perversely, the ink would also have been a challenge. There is no evidence of oil-based inks in the ancient world, and you can't print well with water-based ones.
But I still think the biuggest problem is neither metallurgy nor slavery, but demand. Who in the Roman world actually wants printed text?
IIRC Gutenberg actually reused lots of parts of a winepress. So technology is not the problem in roman times. Slavery is also no major issue. It was more and more replaced from the 2nd century on by other, more profitable forms of production anyways. So the main hurdle is the mass availability of cheap paper.
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Faeelin
Banned
I'm surprised. IIRC The market in the medieval world/renaissance when printing started was people who wanted to buy books, but couldn't afford them; this is why so many of the early books were then touched up to look like manuscripts. is there no comparable group in the Roman world?
Huh? First of all, the entire premise here is flawed. Romans most certainly did not want to keep their neighbors ignorant. They wanted to teach them Roman law, Roman language, and Roman religion. Thats how they made them Roman. Or, at minimum, dependable Roman allies. Plus, stable, sedentary populations tended to pay more taxes or tribute.
Further, the idea that the Persians were ignorant and uneducated compared to the Romans, like the Germanic tribes were is so far out of left field... Google qanat, that should be enough.
In later times, yeah. You'd have to hit the sweet spot, when the Church is big enough to have the potential demand, but still facing challenges from both pagans and other early variations of Christianity.
Say the Marcionites posed a bigger challenge- you might want to get the Old Testament out there as well as the Gospels.
Or you might want to use it to demonstrate that Paul's letters are part and parcel of the whole tradition.
Why not ?
The romans did have foreign/barbarian hostages of allied who lived in contact with roman aristocrany and who learned the same things as roman aristocracy.
There were a fair few scriptoria and bookshops in ancient Rome, not to mention public and private libraries. Maybe during the later Empire literacy had declined, but during the first couple of centuries AD I think there was quite a lot of demand for books.
Actually, the first market for printed articles (and the thing Gutenberg built his machine for) was forms, not books. Many early printers made money printing indulgences, tax receipt forms, pilgrimage blessing slips, calendars and other items that were produced in huge numbers, laboriously, by scribes who really had better things to do with their time. The Gutenberg bible was a risky venture designed to show the potential of the machine. They weren't even sure it would work.
The Roman world had forms, but I'm not sure the system was unitary enough to create demand for print. A lot of the surviving material was written on potsherds and wood strips rather than papyrus. Still, that could be a possible place for demand to arise: Some lowly actarius in Alexandria faces the prospect of writing sacrifice confirmation notes for his centurio regionarius - in longhand - for everybody in the district .... and figures there has to be a better way.
Lucius Verus
Banned
Well to keep the discussion going, what about the fact that the makeup of Roman society was considerably more rural and unequal to that of later Europe? That would shrink potential demand by a dramatic bit.
Not to mention that Gutenburg owed a lot of money to the authorities, he was desperate by the accounts I've read-not economical.
The Roman army from principat and on might create the needed demand for print. That was a heavily beurocratic body and the army's forms all over the Empire were unitary enough.
Usually any military personell outside the residence of his detachment was supposed to have a form saying that he is send on some duty or something (proving that he is not a deserter or a maradeur).
All these payment sheets and so on.
The standard practice of the Roman army was that all the savings of all the legionaries were kept at the legion's headquarters somewhere close by the legion's eagles which means that there must be some standard unitary forms for money receipts.
And so on and so forth...
Faeelin
Banned
What's the evidence for this? We don't see large estates in most of the Roman East, for instance, and IIRC most of the archaeological finds for villages in Syria show most of the houses being pretty similar. This doesn't suggest stark inequality.
Now maybe in Gaul, but everyone knows that Gaul and Britannia are backwater sticks.
In roman times I see one area, were the demand is obvious: jurisdiction. All edicts or decisions of the imperial court (a consilium principis) were published on wooden or bronze tablets at a central place in Rome. Same with decisions of the senate. IIRC it was published at a wall of a temple. Some of them were copied and sent to all propraetors which copied them again for all 2000 city magistrates of the empire. Also lots of lawyers needed a copy all over the empire. The roman iurisdiction was less based on laws but on precedents or leading cases. Not just decisions of the imperial court, but also decisons of the praefectus urbi or the big quaestiones in Rome led by praetors.
Lately I have read an article about the press in Rome. Of course it did not exist in a modern sense. But nevertheless some guys operated a kind of press business. They wrote letters frequently to hundreds of friends in the provinces. These letters were almost identical and full of actual news about the capital (politics, gossips, ... everything). Something like subscribing to a frequent newsletter.
The army, which was already mentioned above, was the biggest buerocracy of the empire. Actually the civil administration of the provinces was operated mainly by the army or personell of the army. And the army knew a lot of forms as Konrad Stauner and others proofed. Not that much standardized like nowadays, but clearly standardized. Unfortunately the army used whatever material was available onsite. So again we need mass availability of paper that the army sees a need for printed forms.
Regarding literature I am rather sceptical. The roman society was less educated than people think. The upper classes (senators, equites and decuriones) were very educated, but thats about 500.000 people of 40-80 Million. Plus many slaves operating the private and public offices were very educated. But the big rest was most probably either analphabets or bad readers/writers with not more than 3-4 years school, and even this not consistently.
Lately I have read an article about the press in Rome. Of course it did not exist in a modern sense. But nevertheless some guys operated a kind of press business. They wrote letters frequently to hundreds of friends in the provinces. These letters were almost identical and full of actual news about the capital (politics, gossips, ... everything). Something like subscribing to a frequent newsletter.
The army, which was already mentioned above, was the biggest buerocracy of the empire. Actually the civil administration of the provinces was operated mainly by the army or personell of the army. And the army knew a lot of forms as Konrad Stauner and others proofed. Not that much standardized like nowadays, but clearly standardized. Unfortunately the army used whatever material was available onsite. So again we need mass availability of paper that the army sees a need for printed forms.
Regarding literature I am rather sceptical. The roman society was less educated than people think. The upper classes (senators, equites and decuriones) were very educated, but thats about 500.000 people of 40-80 Million. Plus many slaves operating the private and public offices were very educated. But the big rest was most probably either analphabets or bad readers/writers with not more than 3-4 years school, and even this not consistently.
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Faeelin
Banned
I have to strongly support the idea that lawyers give the Roman Empire a printing press. In the grimdark future, there is only precedent.
There was an anocdotal story about Diogenes (IIRC) - he asked a librarian for an Iliad and was answered that they did not have this book. Diogenes went for a big stick and gave the librarian a good beating.
My point here is that half of the Roman Empire was Hellenistic. If there was a printing press, first thing coming to my mind is to print 100 000 copies of Illiad.
* by the way the elites of the 'Latin' half of the Roman Empire were mostly billingual and would gladly buy a printed Illiad as well.
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Of course there is a market, even if it is smaller than people might think. But as long as a single page of payrus costs about 2 sesterces, which is about half of the daily income of a day labourer in Rome, books would stay very expensive.
A book with 300 pages would costs 600 sesterces; just for the payrus. You get a decent slave for this money.