Sphinx

It is a bizarre but entirely undiscussed paradox that the alleged technological underdevelopment and primitivist mindset of the ancient world – see M.I. Finley and his followers – was often illustrated by the story (Pliny NH 36.195, Petronius Satyricon 51) of the man who brought to the Emperor Tiberius a goblet made of unbreakable glass, that did not shatter when dropped and could be made perfectly whole again if damaged – and was put to death for his pains. “Hostility to innovation!” they cry. “And isn’t it significant that an inventor went to the emperor for a reward, not to a hi-tech start-up for capital investment?” Well, maybe. But the most important questions are: what was this material, and where did it come from?

Transparent, flexible, shatterproof, self-repairing; this sounds remarkably like a form of plastic, perhaps with embedded nanotech – not just a significant advance on standard ancient material techniques, but a quantum leap. And for a society that has often been characterised in terms of the efficient application of other people’s innovations, there are a couple of other fancy bits of technology that seem to be unique to the Romans: underwater concrete, for example, which can compete with the best of today’s construction techniques.

Time travel? That’s scarcely a historical argument. Better to think in terms of the well-documented tradition of encounters between earlier civilisations and extraterrestrial visitors. Did aliens give the secret of advanced concrete construction to Roman state architects – and, if so, what was their dark purpose? Is this the key to some of Vitruvius’ more gnomic pronouncements on architectural symbolism? Certainly we may suspect that Tiberius’ violent reaction to a stray bit of exotic tech was not due to hostility to anything new but because he knew exactly what it represented – this conspiracy went all the way to the top, and who knows what the ongoing archaeological work on the lower levels of Nero’s Golden House will uncover…

(with thanks to Jess Farr-Cox, @thefilthycomma, for the implicit challenge to come up with a career-ending argument. Still not sure if this is deranged enough, but putting it out there anyway. Given that at least one reader took my old ‘the Romans had steam engines” counterfactual article seriously, the reception of this may be interesting).