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Explanation: This is obviously an exaggeration, as Ancient Egypt undertook plenty of public works, and the Roman Empire built plenty of useless monuments - but we are who we pretend to be, as the saying goes, and the Romans took great pride in seeing themselves as a very practical people. Roads, public theatres and baths, aqueducts, canals, swamp drainage, these were things powerful Romans sponsored to have their name immortalized - or at least spoken well of for a few years!
The Roman writer Frontinus, when discussing the aqueducts of Rome, explicitly makes this comparison, saying that the great works of the Romans were practical architecture that brought a public good, unlike the ‘useless but impressive’ architectural works of the Greeks and Egyptians!
Recent discoveries over the past few decades have also made everyone realize that the Egyptians were motivated to build enormous structures because of their religious faith instead of forced slave labor. It turns out it’s easier to get masses of people to build major projects if you convince them all that they’ll be rewarded in the afterlife for their efforts … rather than whipping them to death to move a stone. The quality and durability of the work also increase if you have a willing and enthusiastic workforce rather than forced enslaved labor.
In short, Romans built things for this life … Egyptians built things for the afterlife.
When you tax grains at production time and pay those as salary at the low season, it’s easy to get a line of candidates too.
Egyptian religion: “There is an afterlife, and this is what it’s like.”
Roman religion: “Uhhh idk”
(By contrast to the effective motivator of Egyptian religion, weighing your soul’s sins against a feather and all that jazz, Roman religion never had a very clear conception of the afterlife; various ideas are floated in Roman texts, ranging from reincarnation, to joining the spirits of the ancestors, to Hades and the Elysian Fields, to oneness with the divine - hard to make a coherent argument for spiritual benefits when you can’t even decide what benefit that is!)
The whole idea of religion with the Romans is interesting for sure … I think they were very practical about the whole idea along with the way they saw everything else. I think they just realized life and death in a very practical way … that we are born, we live and then we die - full stop. There was nothing beforehand, there is something now, and there is nothing after. And I think it is stuff like that that made it very hard for late period Romans to appreciate … why would you fight for a system that doesn’t have any promises for an afterlife, let alone the life you are currently living? And I think it was one of the driving forces behind why everything shifted towards Christianity … it was a promise to non-believers and those not born to a religion to gain access to some mystical afterlife and also a threat to any non-believer that they would burn in everlasting hell and damnation. It’s easy to make these promises and threats to uneducated masses … it’s basically still happening today.
