Technologies You Know that The Ancient Romans Did Not

Let's imagine that you're cast back in time to ancient Rome, and being the loyal citizen of the emperor that you are, you decide to give them some modern technologies so that they can continue with their domination of the known world. You think of advanced computers, life-saving medicine, and automatic weapons. But you remember, you know nothing about computers, nothing about medicine, or even how to make gunpowder. But fear not, there are some things that you know right now that the ancient Romans did not. The first thing you should tell the Romans to do is wash their dirty hands. We know today that most diseases are caused by microbial life, but the ancient Romans did not. They thought diseases were caused by an imbalance of one or more of your four humors, things like blood and bile, which is total nonsense. All you would have to do is tell Roman soldiers to wash their hands before they eat with a really strong mix of water and vinegar. This would kill most microbial life and save thousands from dying of disease, which is actually what most Roman soldiers died from, not by fighting in battles. Most people today think of the Romans as quite innovative in building things, but actually they weren't in many ways. They didn't even know about the wheelbarrow. If they wanted to move materials from A to B, they'd simply use baskets carried by hand, probably by slaves, or with the help of animals like mules. All you'd have actually had to tell the Romans to do is to get a wheel, which they obviously had, and attach a platform to it. This uses leverage and enables you to move materials over much greater distances than carrying by hand. One of the reasons why the Romans didn't invent the wheelbarrow, though, was that they were over-reliant on slave labor. Why bother inventing new technologies when you just have slaves that can do things for free? Although the Romans did introduce new agricultural techniques to many of their provinces, like using the heavy plough to actually churn through soil, rather than just make lines in it, they were still stuck in the past. What you should tell them to do is grow different crops on the same field in each season. This way the soil has time to replenish its nutrients after every growth. Don't use monocultures. Use different crops. It's called crop rotation. Another thing you should do is you should tell the Romans to select only the best animals to breed with each other, known as selective breeding. This along with crop rotation are two easy fixes that you could introduce to the Roman Empire and make it so much more efficient, yet they had no idea about these concepts at the time. You should obviously choose the animals with the most meat or the most fur to breed with each other, so that future generations will have more meat and more fur. Although the Romans did try to do this, they never introduced it at a wide scale like we do today. So remember, when you're sent back to ancient Rome, tell them to wash their hands. Tell them to use a wheelbarrow. And tell them to use a bit of crop rotation and selective breeding.