Two thousand years ago in Roman Spain, the provincial capital of Augusta Emerita was established. It was designed to be home to retired troops of the fifth and tenth legions who had fought the empire’s wars and, rather like our Seabees, supervised the vast building projects required. Now they would farm the surrounding land they were given, keep the Pax, and inculcate the Roman way. Roman rule of Lusitania lasted hundreds of years, but then the capital was occupied by Visigoths, then Moors, then Christians.
The new town was built, as always, on the imperial template and soon had its temples to the gods, guard houses and fort, an amphitheater for games, a theater for plays and civic meetings, a circus for races, and the longest surviving Roman bridge, spanning the Guadiana River for a length of over seven football fields. Recently, on a fast visit to Portugal we swerved to spend two days in Merida, as Augusta Emerita is now named. There you can visit all of these remains and more, including a Roman villa of 9,000 square feet with the customary mosaics, and the remains of an aqueduct marching across the surrounding plain with the nests of storks atop it.
Perhaps best is the National Museum of Roman Art. It includes, on a basement level, a crypt and Roman road uncovered during construction, and on three floors above, designed to echo the arches of the nearby bridge and aqueduct, an impressive collection of artifacts, the fruits of the archaeologists’ diggings.
One may wander among delicate glassware, golden jewelry, coins with the images of emperors, statues of politicians in the guise of gods to further the civic religion, the tombstones of the patrician dead and the grindstones on which their plebeian servants sharpened their weapons and agricultural tools. The latter were used to provide the wheat, grapes, and olives needed to feed the townsmen their daily ration of bread, wine and oil.
We marvel at the beauty and antiquity, artistic and technical skills displayed but rarely ask, in such memorials to the past, the social and economic questions the artifacts should provoke. Whose hands made all this? Who were the craftsmen behind the sculptures and mosaics, whose brute labor behind the quarried stone and acres of bricks, the serving bowls and oil lamps?
The empire and all its artifacts, its order and beauty were the work of the legions, of local and distant artisans, of farmers and of slaves who drove the carts, cut the stones, threshed the grain, crushed the grapes, mined the metal, carved the fluted columns with hammer and chisel, spanned the river with its bridge, conquered all of Lusitania. and kept it running.
In our own time, we attend the games under Friday night lights, enjoy our daily bread from the market, and watch the circuses on the big screen tv as actors do battle. But how often do we give a thought to those who transport us, deliver our goods, farm our food, mine the metals from which our cars, planes, and iphones are made?
Those who keep the lights on, the water running, the roads in repair, maintain the civic order that protects us from barbarians abroad, and empty our trash cans and bedpans, nurse our children, and clean up our messes at home are invisible. How often do we pause to considers how poorly paid and shabbily treated are the legions who guard us and the teachers who educate us? Only rarely is our attention drawn to the men and women who made things but are now discarded, their jobs obsolete or outsourced.
The historian Louis Hyman offers this brief, pungent note on postmodern times. “To understand the electronics industry is simple. Every time someone says ‘robots,’ simply picture a woman of color.” That is, our interconnected, silicon world is as dependent on the poorly compensated toil of an exploited class as the Gilded Age with its sweatshops, the South of King Cotton or Augusta Emerita.
When the few forget they rely on the many and fail to give them a life worth living, the empire crumbles from without and within, and the dark ages arrive. The Romans didn’t pretend to believe in democracy or equality, but we do. Shouldn’t we act like it? In the 1850s, Walt Whitman heard America singing – the mechanics, woodcutters, masons, shoemakers, boatmen. Their descendants are singing a different tune today. We should listen.