What have the Romans ever done for us?

Quite a lot, actually

I have been watching the revived version of Time Team on YouTube, including an episode in which a small group of archaeologists investigates a mysterious standing stone in a cleared forest in Derbyshire, England.

The new programme is pleasant enough, although this particular episode has the atmosphere of several knowledgeable people going camping with a cameraman. The old Time Team would have arrived with Tony Robinson, Phil Harding, a mechanical excavator, geophysics equipment and underground radar, a helicopter, a scaffolding tower, several professors, a catering truck, and enough vehicles to make the local council think a bypass was being built.

The new team has a few tents, some hand tools, and a stone.

The difficulty with prehistoric archaeology is that nearly everything interesting has disappeared. Sherds of pottery, bits of bone, filled-in ditches and stone monuments survive. Conversations, inscriptions, jokes, songs, political arguments and complaints about the younger generation do not.

Consequently, Bronze Age Britain can appear to have been populated by people who lived in something resembling a permanent gypsy encampment and occasionally dragged a large stone across a field and propped it upright for no obvious reason.

Of course, these were not intellectually primitive people, or at least their brains were essentially the same as ours. They loved their children, feared illness, remembered the dead and probably wondered about the meaning of life. They may have had complicated religious and philosophical ideas, but since they didn’t write them down or make videos, we cannot recover them.

We do not even know what language they spoke. “Bronze Age Britain” covers many centuries and several migrations. Some inhabitants may have spoken early Indo-European languages, possibly ancestral or related to Celtic. Others may have spoken languages that long ago disappeared completely.

The standing stone might have marked a grave, a boundary, a meeting place or a sacred landscape. It might have been called the Door of the Dead, Grandmother’s Stone, or Sally. We simply do not know.

What we do know is that these supposedly primitive people could manufacture bronze. That required sourcing copper and tin from mines far away, extracting and processing the ores, controlling very high temperatures in furnaces, mixing the metals in approximately the right proportions and casting the result.

Most modern people can operate a smartphone, but how many of us could make a bronze axe starting with just a hillside, a few flints, and no matches?

Nevertheless, the knowledge available to Bronze Age people was limited by human memory. Skills had to be taught by apprenticeship. Stories had to be memorized and repeated. If the only man who knew how to make a particular tool fell into a bog on a rainy day, an entire piece of cutting-edge tech like a particular style of flint axe head might disappear with him.

The greatest leap forward in civilization was not that human beings suddenly became more intelligent. It was that libraries began to allow knowledge to accumulate outside individual human heads.

Writing allowed instructions and ideas to survive their creators. Books allowed people to study the thoughts of someone who had died hundreds of years earlier. Mathematics permitted accurate measurement. Historians created records of what had been done before and laws could be written down, although, as today, this did not necessarily prevent rulers from ignoring them.

But writing and books were not enough. Civilization also required organization on a scale much larger than the family or village and that usually meant government.

This may come as disappointing news to people who believe government is an unnecessary interference in the otherwise perfect operation of human society.

Governments created standardized weights and measures, coinage, courts, roads, ports, drainage systems and water supplies. They organized armies, collected taxes, maintained records and established rules for trade. They also supported the towns in which craftsmen, engineers, teachers and philosophers could go to work without spending until lunchtime foraging for mushrooms and berries for breakfast.

Governments were frequently corrupt, brutal and wasteful. They waged unnecessary wars, enslaved conquered peoples, built monuments to themselves and imposed taxes on anyone insufficiently powerful to avoid paying them. In other words government bureaucracy functioned much as it does today.

Yet without some central authority, it is difficult to construct an aqueduct, maintain a road across hundreds of miles or pipe clean water to a city. A collection of independent households might agree that a sewer would be kind of useful, but somebody still has to decide where it goes, acquire the land, collect the money and stop one obstinate neighbour from blocking the whole project because the trench passes too close to his fig tree.

The Romans understood this very well. Their empire gave much of Europe roads, bridges, ports, public baths, water systems, courts and administrative records. Roman government was hardly democratic and its tax collectors were not universally loved by taxpayers. Nevertheless, its infrastructure allowed people, goods, soldiers and ideas to travel enormous distances by road, sea, or river, and stay overnight in inns.

The point is not that more government is always better. The Roman Empire occasionally demonstrated that there is such a thing as excessive government, particularly if you were picked to be crucified as an example to others beside one of its modern super highways.

The real choice has never been between government and no government. It is between a government that performs useful collective tasks competently and a government that performs them badly, expensively or for the benefit of a privileged few.

Cuenca offers ordinary examples. We have drinking water, sewers, electricity, paved streets, public parks, buses and the Tranvía. Private businesses provide many services, but they depend upon public roads, laws, courts, permits, utilities, policing and a reasonably stable currency.

Even people who insist that the government should leave them alone become surprisingly interested in the government when their garbage is not collected, their street floods due to blocked drains, or someone builds a nightclub next door.

Civilization is cumulative. Bronze Age metalworkers contributed one part. Greek philosophers contributed another. Roman engineers and administrators added more. Medieval scholars, Islamic mathematicians, printers, scientists and industrial workers continued the process.

None of them invented the modern world alone. Each generation inherited a body of knowledge and a set of institutions, modified them and passed them on. And let’s not forget that sometimes history went backwards. Roman pottery remains instantly recognizable, because it was mass produced and shaped on wheels in factories, but after the Romans left Britain the technology for making pots on wheels was completely forgotten, and Anglo-Saxon pottery, such as it was, looked like clay shaped by hand in an elementary school crafts class.

The people who erected that Derbyshire standing stone may have possessed no formal state. But organizing enough people to transport and raise a massive stone required leadership, cooperation, agreed rules and some recognized authority.

In other words, even the standing stone may have been a government project.

It was probably completed three years late, exceeded its original budget and was opposed by protestors who said the money should have been spent fixing the drains at the local copper mine.