I read the words of the dead.
WRL
Karma: 4
I have to second this comment. As a classicist, the common factor throughout a lot of Roman stagnation is that you just simply do not have the incentive to create mechanical options if you have a (seemingly) limitless number of slaves to do your tasks for you, from working in mills to mining silver to being your doctor and your tutor and so on. It’s also probably one of the factors that led to such a total and sudden loss of knowledge on a lot of subjects once the entire thing collapsed, because once you’re no longer forced to stay with your “owner” on pain of violence you leave.
Roman/Greek/Mediterranean slavery was technically much more livable than say, 19th century American chattel/racialized slavery, but it was still very bad, and very ubiquitous. And you can actually see parallels to the question in the 19th Century American Slave-owning South; it would have been much more financial expedient for the South to have mechanized, but the planters were ideologically attached to the slave system, and chose being plantation owners with slaves over more efficient industry.
I do think the Roman empire actually had the preconditions for some kind of industrialization, though maybe not an entirely familiar one; there were Greek inventors who created small steam-powered devices, after all. But these, like a lot of things that would seem familiar to us, were considered mostly intriguing toys, because once again, there is no reason to make a labor-saving device when you can simply go somewhere and steal people to do that labor.
I’m including this wikipedia article because it’s actually a pretty good summary of the text/writer in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitruvius.
While I agree that their counting system was not super useful for a lot of complicated mathematical or theoretical stuff, what you get instead is a lot of architecture, engineering, etc. that has familiar ideas in different terms. What you see if you look into the technology Vitrivius described is that they had a lot of “industrial” things (cranes, siege engines, etc.) but these were all constructed/powered using slaves.
You can also see that the Romans were aware of primitive steam technology. My personal understanding for why they didn’t develop it further was that they had no ideological or financial reason to stop using slaves for all brute mechanical tasks, and since slaves were so disenfranchised, there was no reason to find ways of replacing them.