No Sex, Please, We're Roman

A History of Mankind (232)

To read previous newsletters in the History of Mankind, which is pretty long, you can click here.

Political and engineering feats gained for Imperial Rome an aura of efficiency and success that it retained all over Europe for millennia – in contrast with the memory of despotism that, for example, Persian and Parthian dominance left in non-Persian regions¹.

Just in Philadelphia/Amman, a provincial backwater in modern Jordan on the edge of their empire and the Arabian desert, the Romans built in the 2^nd century a series of public monuments unlike anything the Persians erected in any provincial capital – including the Nymphaeum, a three-meter deep, 600-square-meter pool continuously refilled with water provided by Roman aqueducts.

Even in Rome itself, for long a focus of political infighting, Augustus-era reforms led to more efficient administration with much less political friction: for example, Augustus increased the pace of rotation of Roman consuls, eventually limiting their term to just six months, so that there would be a large pool of consulars available to take posts across the empire.

Social and even moral reforms were a significant part of the Augustan package too, even if not everybody loved them particularly in Rome, a city that already had a reputation for debauchery by this era.