How did Romans take a shit? That's at the heart of this book. Not just the how - but the why, the when, and the where. How did foreign toilet habits influence the state? Was hygiene properly understood? What are the limits of Roman engineering.

The book is interesting without being particularly entertaining. This isn't a Mary Roach style wander through the street of Pompei - it's a fairly dry scholarly work. It's also - like many academic eBooks - poorly formatted; all the figures and illustrations are placed at the end rather than being integrated with the text. It also doesn't distinguish between citations and footnotes, which can make reading it a bit wearisome.

It is full of curious little asides. As well as finding out that the Bocca della Veritá is probably a sewer cover (ew!) there's also this:

A rather startling anecdote in Aelian’s De natura animalium illustrates the perceived inherent danger that threatened when a house was connected to the public sewer. According to the tale, each night an octopus swam up through a house drain in the toilet, accessed a pantry, and ate the pickled fish stored there by Iberian merchants. As octopi are saltwater creatures, it is hard to believe that they could survive in a Roman sewer for very long, but the story would have raised eyebrows about sewer connections.

It also revealed to me just how much I didn't know about Roman culture.

From birth the Roman male was to be subjected to sensual deprivation, on the one hand, and strong bodily manipulation on the other. Not only were the nose and the back of the head of male Roman babies manually shaped on a daily basis by nurses or mothers, but their penises as well were regularly manipulated to stretch the foreskin.

O...K...

Ultimately, it's a fascinating look at just how sanitation came to be embedded in the empire, its limits, and the politics which made it possible. And lots of discussion about ancient graffiti!

Obligatory "Life of Brian" quote

REG: What have the Romans ever given us in return?
XERXES: The aqueduct?
REG: What?
XERXES: The aqueduct.
REG: Oh. Yeah, yeah. They did give us that. Uh, that's true. Yeah.
COMMANDO: And the sanitation.
LORETTA: Oh, yeah, the sanitation, Reg. Remember what the city used to be like?
REG: Yeah. All right. I'll grant you the aqueduct and the sanitation are two things that the Romans have done.

True!

"In Hamlet, Act Ⅳ, Scene Ⅸ..."

Most people with a grasp of the interplay between English and Latin would say "In Hamlet, Act four, scene nine". And they'd be right! But screen-readers - computer programs which convert text into speech - often get this wrong.

Why? Well, because I didn't just type "Uppercase Letter i, Uppercase Letter v". Instead, I used the Unicode symbol for the Roman numeral 4 - Ⅳ. And, it turns out, lots of screen-readers have a problem with those characters.

Don't Know Much About History

Unicode contains the range of Roman numbers from 1 - 10, plus a couple of compound numbers, 50, 100, 500, and 1000 - in a variety of forms.

Why does Unicode contain these number which, to most people, are just squashed together Latin letter? As ever with Unicode, it is a mix of legacy and practicality.

The Unicode standard says:

Roman Numerals. For most purposes, it is preferable to compose the Roman numerals from sequences of the appropriate Latin letters. However, the uppercase and lowercase variants of the Roman numerals through 12, plus L, C, D, and M, have been encoded for compatibility with East Asian standards. Unlike sequences of Latin letters, these symbols remain upright in vertical layout. Additionally, in certain locales, compact date formats use Roman numerals for the month, but may expect the use of a single character.

Far be it for me to disagree with the learned authors of the spec, but I think they may have erred slightly on this one. While it may be preferable to re-use Latin letters, it leads to ambiguity which can be confusing for a screen-reader.

Practical Examples

Let's write out the numbers using regular letters. Suppose you were talking about "Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Scene I". Most screen readers will see the "III" and correctly speak aloud "Roman three" or similar. But when they get to the "I" it becomes ambiguous. Most will read out "Eye".

Screen-readers rarely look at the whole sentence for context. Which means they get confused. It's fairly obvious that XIV should be "fourteen" as there's no English word "xiv"⁰. But what about "MIX" - is that 1009 or the word "mix"?

Anyone who has watched the BBC knows about their fondness for displaying in Latin the year a programme was made. MCMXCVI is particularly challenging for a screen-reader!

Testing It

I took the following sample sentence - using both letters and Roman numerals.

Text. In Hamlet, Act I, Scene XI the year is MCMXCVI and they are watching Rocky V.

Roman. In Hamlet, Act Ⅰ, Scene Ⅺ the year is ⅯⅭⅯⅩⅭⅥ and they are watching Rocky Ⅴ.

Here's how various services coped:

Amazon Polly

First, the good news. Amazon's Polly read the Roman numerals perfectly. It even pronounced ⅯⅭⅯⅩⅭⅥ as "nineteen ninety six".

Microsoft Edge Read Aloud

I tried with Microsoft Edge's Read Aloud TTS.

It and makes a bit of a hash of the English and just skips the Roman numerals.

Google Text To Speech

The same was also true with Google's TTS products.

Espeak NG

The venerable Linux utility came out with this.

It gets the "Capital i" incorrect, and reads the Roman numerals as their Unicode code points.

Jaws

My good friend Léonie Watson who writes extensively about accessibility was kind enough to record some other samples for me.

Here are Jaws' "Expressive":

And Jaws' "Eloquence:

NVDA

Léonie also provided a recording of NVDA Microsoft One Core

Narrator

And here's Narrator making a right mess of it.

Others

If you know of any other screen-readers, or text-to-speech engines which can cope with this, please let me know!

Fixing it

On Linux, I raised a Pull Request to fix espeak-ng.

The rest of the services don't seem to have a way to easily report bugs to them. If you know a way to raise issues with these screen readers - please do so!

In our universe, the modern semaphore tower was first conceived by Robert Hooke in 1684. Yet it the optical telegraph didn't really exist until 1792 - over a hundred years later.

The basics of the optical telegraph are relatively simple. You stand in a tower and perform an action which can be seen by a person in another tower. That action is translated into a message, which can then be routed to another tower until it reaches its intended recipient.

What I find interesting is that there was nothing fundamentally to stop the Romans - or any other ancient civilization - from creating such a network. The Greeks experimented with it in 4BCE but it seems it never really caught on. Tower building is easy, as is flag waving or other mechanical forms of signalling. Their technology was certainly capable of building a proto-Internet. That would have had some profound changes to our history.

Rapid communication leads us to some interesting mathematical problems - namely encryption and compression. You want to make sure your message is secure from eavesdropping (including by the operators) and you want to send the message quickly. As a network becomes complex, you need to develop a routing protocol - explaining where the message has come from and where it needs to go. You need algorithms to determine the optimal path through a system.

Social changes come too. In Tom Standage's The Victorian Internet he talks about how the telegraph system disrupted commerce and society. The Victorian Internet was used to commit crimes, distribute suppressed information, manipulate markets, and to corrupt the youth. Not so very different from our own Internet!

Imagine what the world would be like if we'd had a 2,000 year head start on the principles of the Internet? Every day we see the efficiencies which a reliable communication network brings. Our knowledge of mathematics increases as we struggle to squeeze more information into limited channels. While rapid communication hasn't averted war - it has helped nation speak unto nation.

Consider the lonely alchemist who had to wait years to receive replies from far off lands - how much more quickly would science have progressed if people could instantly communicate their discoveries to an audience of their peers?

If the Romans had built a practical semaphore, not only would we all be speaking Latin, but our society would be a great deal more advanced. So why didn't they?

The main limiting factor, I think, is the lack of a decent telescope. Without the ability to see over great distances, communication towers have to be located relatively close to one another. That makes them more expensive - especially when a good horse can carry a message over a similar distance.

This is the story of technology in a nutshell. An amazing advancement is just beyond our grasp due to a minor inconvenience. A start-up fails because horses are cheaper and more reliable now. When Pheidippides can run 240Km in two days - why bother with the great expense of building towers and paying soldiers to staff them?

The future course of humanity delayed for want of a lens.

I'm sure history is littered with such examples. I'm not talking about the spurious claims of Ancient Egyptian flying saucers - or even strange artefacts like the Baghdad Battery. Electricity, it seems, was discovered and lost several times. In modern times, we saw the rise of powerful encryption techniques at Bletchley park - these were then suppressed by the UK Government and "lost" - they were then "invented" many years later by American mathematicians.

It is natural for people of the twentieth century to assume that our existing body of knowledge contains all the facts and processes which were within the ken of earlier men, plus the infinitely rich new content of modern science. A corollary of this assumption is that the prodigious enrichment of knowledge by the scientific research of the past three centuries-that is, since the time of Gilbert, Galileo, Harvey, and others-makes that part of knowledge which was attained by all preceding generations pale into insignificance.

But in truth both the assumption and its corollary are unwarranted. In the light of archaeology we can not doubt that the ancients knew a good many valuable and highly significant facts which nobody knows to-day. It goes without saying that the amount of this lost knowledge is beyond any one's power to estimate...

The Logical Significance of Rediscovered Knowledge, Daniel Sommer Robinson, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 22, No. 13 (Jun. 18, 1925), pp. 346-353

What are we missing now? What tiny changes would divert our destiny? It's hard to discover what we don't know we don't know, but there are a few that strike me as tantalizingly close. Some are mathematical, some technological, and some merely economical.

• Public Key Trust. The way we deal with trust in the PKI sphere is broken. Is there a simple way to verify the identity of a public key?
• Rapid and free transfer of money. At the moment, it's impossible to transfer a solitary cent commercially without incurring a prohibitive cost. What does the Internet look like when it's trivial to throw tuppence at a blogger?
• Waste energy capture. Humans pump out a lot of energy, we generate heat and movement which dissapates into the environment. A kinetic watch will run for as long as its owner keeps moving - can we use that energy to power something more complex?
• Self healing materials. Stronger material - like the lost Damascus Steel would be nice - but why can't our object grow and heal?
• Cold Fusion. Or, at least, a way to generate power in such a way that energy security is no longer an issue.

I would love to believe that there is an old untranslated manuscript which teaches us the secrets of anti-gravity or telepathic communication. What I think is more likely is that we'll discover just how close humanity came to a major technological breakthrough - only to have lost our way.

I look back on the Romans and wonder what the world would now look like had they persevered with their ancient Internet. I'm sure the future will look back at us and whisper "if only..."