| ▲ | ekianjo 3 days ago |
| > As it turns out, even the Romans understood the power of a good hat. The author thinks Roman had low intellect or something? |
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| ▲ | WalterBright 3 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| I would think a bald man would soon connect the dots between sun exposure and sun burn. |
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| ▲ | justinclift 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ |
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| ▲ | decimalenough 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| No, the Romans just generally did not wear hats, particularly the upper classes. Every Roman statue ever depicts a full head of hair, occasionally with veils, wigs or hairnets, but not hats. Apparently even Caesar's famous laurel wreath was meant primarily as a disguise for baldness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_hairstyles |
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| ▲ | IAmBroom 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Suspect. Laurel wreaths would make the world's worst toupee, as they are empty in the center, and provide the most coverage where balding men have the most hair. | |
| ▲ | jordanb 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Probably hats were associated with people who work in the sun like farmers or soldiers.. Togas were also impractical clothing compared to a tunic. | |
| ▲ | ekianjo 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Every roman statue depicts politicians and leaders who lived in the city. Peasants, farmers did not get statues. |
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| ▲ | deadbabe 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Most people think ancient people were idiots. Romans could have invented steam engines if they wanted to. |
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| ▲ | steve_adams_86 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | One thing I've learned is that in all of the brief history of humans we're aware of, people a lot smarter than I am existed in fairly large numbers. It puts things into perspective. They would have learned to use hacker news and program computers as easily as I do. We stand on the shoulders of giants. I love the perspective they had on things due to living in such different (yet remarkably similar) conditions. | | |
| ▲ | mk89 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | 100% agreed with you. I think we forget we're the "same" (more or less) homo sapiens as 200+ thousand years ago. Better overall conditions allow us to use the brain more (books, universities, etc) but our brain hasn't changed, as far as I know. | | |
| ▲ | steve_adams_86 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Right, and as far as I know as well. It's kind of exciting when you realize just how much there is to learn from the people who came before us. All of the most interesting, difficult problems of human minds and experiences are still almost just as pressing and difficult today, but many people had remarkable insights and made genuinely incredible progress in understanding things we tend to take for granted these days. Hard problems that we face literally every day, even. |
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| ▲ | davnicwil 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Definitely true. In modern times we confuse understanding things with just being used to them. I'm typing this on a smartphone. I don't conciously think of it as my "magic pane of glass" like the cliched Roman might but what's actually going on when I tap this screen is as much a mystery to me as it would be to them, at least beyond a few high-level concepts which it also wouldn't take all that much time to explain. Every day we ride atop an unfathomable stack of abstractions and shouldn't take as much subconcious credit for this as we do. As a civilisation yes you might say we're smarter, but as individuals definitely not. | | |
| ▲ | delichon 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I don't think that's just a modern thing. The feeling that you understand your phone is the same as feeling you understand the hand holding it. The hand is as magical of a technology as the phone. We are deeply adapted to living with such magic. | | |
| ▲ | davnicwil 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Agreed. Indeed I'd guess the average Roman felt similarly about civilisations that came before them! |
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| ▲ | deadbabe 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think if you transported the average Roman to modern times, after the initial future shock wears off, they would likely just become accustomed to technology much like any other person today who has no clue how most things work. They could learn to drive cars, use smartphones, catch flights, take medicine, etc. They would probably even spend a lot of time talking about how things were better back in their days, and how pathetic society is now. |
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| ▲ | ekianjo 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Romans could have invented steam engines if they wanted to. You invent such things when you have resolved many other problems first. Like water and sanitation, and geopolitical stability. And no, steam engines took a lot more time anyway because advanced metallurgy was necessary to get there. | | |
| ▲ | Illniyar 3 days ago | parent [-] | | If geopolitical stability was a precursor to technology, we would still be living in the stone age :) | | |
| ▲ | ekianjo 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | There were times where one would be involved in many wars happening at their local level within their lifetime. We have had two big wars in the 20th century but many countries were not directly the theater of war and most frontiers did not change. There is much more stability now, you just get a lot of news that makes you seem that the world is chaos but the reality is the opposite. | |
| ▲ | ericmay 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Right - you could almost argue that the opposite is generally true. |
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| ▲ | WalterBright 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Romans could have invented steam engines if they wanted to. They did not have the precursors to it, such as a lathe. Steam engine technology evolved out of cannon technology, which was developing for centuries before the steam engine. (The lathe also came about from cannon improvements.) | | |
| ▲ | wqaatwt 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | You also needed cheap fuel and relatively expensive labour to make it feasible. Early engines were used to pump water out of coal mines because they were very inefficient and transportation was very expensive. Of course Romans actually had coal mines in Britain and the Rhineland so it wouldn’t have been entirely fat fetched. | | |
| ▲ | WalterBright 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Most major inventions need a lot of available precursor technology, so it's actually kinda hard to think of things the Romans could have done if they only knew. I keep thinking of a primitive printing press, but the Romans didn't have paper, either. Paper didn't appear in Europe before 1000 AD. | | |
| ▲ | Ekaros 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Actually it seems textile printing does have contemporary history. And maybe even older one. So jump from there to other materials might not be impossible. | |
| ▲ | UncleSlacky 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | They had papyrus, though. | | |
| ▲ | WalterBright 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Not really. They imported it, and never figured out how to make it. The papyrus plant would only grow in Egypt. Papyrus was also inferior to paper in that it tended to come apart when wet, or would just come apart. | | |
| ▲ | LtWorf 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Papyrus grows fine in sicily (I have a lot in the garden, besides some water it doesn't really need any special care). Besides egypt was roman so… | | |
| ▲ | wqaatwt 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Papyrus is also not a very good material for writing outside of arid areas compared to paper and especially parchment. Unless kept in very good condition scrolls might last only a few decades. As far as we can tell many ancient texts were lost well before the Roman Empire declined because they weren’t popular enough for anyone to bother copying them. |
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| ▲ | idkfasayer 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | The only reason the Romans could not have invented the steam engine was that the Greeks already did before them: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile They had a Lathe too. | | |
| ▲ | WalterBright 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I didn't know the Romans had the lathe. Thanks for the correction. But they did not have a metal lathe, which is substantially more sophisticated. Invention of the metal lathe is credited to Henry Maudslay around 1800. While steam engines with pistons existed before, the poor sealing because of inaccurate bores and pistons, made them not very efficient. | |
| ▲ | mk89 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Incredible. I found this video that shows how the Aelopile works: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/trUtLLu_Ono What an awesome invention!!! | | |
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