The Romans themselves seemed much prouder of their achievements in organization, management and administration than in engineering, and they left systematic science and philosophy to the Greeks.

Every now and then archaeologists turn up fresh evidence of just how clever they were. When the Nemi ships were found, their skill as naval architects was revealed, even though the Romans had never been considered particularly noteworthy in that field.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemi_ships

To this day, we still can’t reproduce their siege engines using only the materials available to them, and we can’t figure out how the deployable canvas awnings that kept Coliseum audiences in the shade were rigged.

The use of slaves was common throughout the ancient world, for the simple fact that many tasks worth doing collectively were simply too difficult or dangerous to be performed individually, or at least, profitably. What the Romans did was to apply their talent for management and administration to organizing and maintaining immense populations of slaves effectively and economically. They didn’t invent slavery, they just turned it into a business. The coercion and intimidation necessary to accomplish this on an industrial scale must have required unimaginable cruelty and human suffering.

What I find particularly troubling is that maintaining large slave populations profitably must have required utilizing their labor cost-effectively. The slaves did not only have to work hard, to be profitable they had to work almost continuously. Their rest and nutrition and other maintenance costs must have been just enough to keep them alive long enough to ensure a return on investment. We know slaves were individually expensive, so they must have been highly profitable. And we also know that their service was not necessarily physical labor. Many positions we now would call technical, administrative, or even professional were filled by slaves.

In my opinion, it was never a choice between technology and slavery. In fact, the Roman slave economy was to a great extent made possible, even necessary, by technology. Our own experience has shown that that no technology can protect us from brutal, dehumanizing labor. In fact, the two often seem to go hand in hand.

These were built by slave labor…