Elite Romans decorated their floors with garbage | Hacker News Reader

Elite Romans decorated their floors with garbage

atlasobscura.com

96 pointsivanech40 comments

This led me down a very interesting rabbit hole of learning about Roman "Sumptuary laws [0]" various laws passed to prevent inordinate expense in banquets, dress etc..

A few I found interesting:

Orchia, proposed by the tribune C. Orchius in the third year after the censorship of Cato B.C. 181, limited the number of guests to be present at entertainments

Aemilia, did not limit the expenses of entertainments, but the kind and quantity of food that was to be used

senatusconsultum was passed ... for the purpose of restraining luxury, which forbade gold vases to be employed, except for sacred purposes, and which also prohibited the use of silk garments to men

[0] https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/secondary...

What was the purpose of these laws, though?

Conspicuous consumption and waste arouses the ire of the lower classes and leads to civil unrest.

Are you sure it's not more simple, less cynical? Perhaps morality of the time and place didn't want people to be conspicuous-consuming assholes, and saw it as the duty of the state to uphold.

Those are two sides of the same coin in my view. Though I'm no expert on Roman history I've read enough about it to see such ebbs and flows.

Ancient Rome had no shortage of outrageous decadence and constantly struggled with class warfare, slave uprisings and the political necessity of winning the hearts of the "people"

I'm not saying these concerns aren't anywhere in Roman history and politics (that would be naive), but I think in many cases the law can be a reflection or encoding of what a culture puts value on, without that as direct explanation. If there was a cultural outrage, and expectation that the state do something... Then why not?

We spend a lot of time in society today talking about "limited government" and focusing a lot on overreach, many people thinking the state shouldn't legislate morality. I have a hunch the Romans felt less of this.

The idea that "conspicuous" consumption is worse than inconspicuous consumption is necessarily rooted in classism -- it's that you don't want the "lowers" to see what they can't have, and anyways, you're only jockeying for status among the uppers anyways, so why not consume inconspicuously in an uppers-exclusive environment?

Entertainment was often held to buy votes or influence. The gold vase law was enacted by Emperor Tiberius, who seemed to dislike opulence in general.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumptuary_law lists "regulate the balance of trade by limiting the market for expensive imported goods" as one possibly surprising - but logical - purpose (among many others).

Upper classes get annoyed when nouveau riche show off their wealth, and so impose restrictions by class.

To my understanding china sucked up huge amounts of Roman wealth due to luxury imports (silk). Silk ban could have been an attempt to repair the trade imbalance.

the Romans almost certainly did not understand trade imbalances or the effects of debasement/inflation.

There are speeches to the Senate that remain and address directly the problem of luxury imports draining Rome of precious metals. Monetary policies were of great import in Roman history and Roman politics. They absolutely knew what inflation _is_, although they didn't have a complete picture. But I don't think we do either.

Herbert Hoover championed and then signed a sumptuary law regulating the number and type of pieces in a cutlery set.

The rise of machine made cutlery led to an explosion of different kinds of forks, knives and such, and keeping up with the Joneses causing stress on households.

"As late as 1926, some patterns were still being made with as many as 146 distinct kinds of utensils. To help simplify the situation for American industry, Herbert Hoover, then secretary of commerce, recommended—and members of the Sterling Silverware Manufacturers Association adopted—a list of fifty-five items as the greatest number of separate pieces that would be in any pattern thereafter introduced."

https://publicism.info/history/useful/9.html

A number of comments:

https://www.smpub.com/ubb/Forum1/HTML/002518.html

That's very different from "championed and signed a law." Government agencies recommend lots of things, and industry associations sometimes adopt them; calling these "laws" way overstates the government's control.

I was curious and went reading to learn more about this. Seems to have been Hoover acting as Secretary of Commence before presidency. I wasn’t able to find a lot of additional details on this, but there’s a discussion on a silver forum I found interesting [0]

> In 1925/6, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, responding to a silver shortage, ordered the Bureau of Standards to limit the number of pieces in a flatware pattern to 55. Arbiter of manners Emily Post approved of the restriction, declaring, "No rule of etiquette is of less importance than which fork we use." Elaborate silverware has been on the decline ever since.

[0] https://www.smpub.com/ubb/Forum1/HTML/002518.html

So it was a sham? I always wondered why, for example, you'd need a different fork and knife for fish when the regular ones are perfectly adequate at moving said fish from the plate to your mouth, and if anything the fish knife is a lesser parody of a knife

Social customs/manners/etiquette are almost always a sham.

A fish knife is used to remove the spiney bones from the fish .. getting the fish in your mouth is the fork's job.

The two forks is strictly a class-signaling booby trap to identify who isn’t accustomed to fine dining.

Then again, the rule is to go from the outside to the inside as the meal progress. It's not very effective at signaling when it's so simple.

You likely learned that rule (and others may be learning it here from you) in a manner that either 1) required access to the upper class, serving its class-signaling powers, or 2) required information access like the Internet, or etiquette books, etc. that were not readily available to the class outsiders of Herbert Hoover's time.

I don't know. I just learned it in school in a not-very-useful home economics class in a public school. This was around 1990 (give or take a year, as I'm not sure what grade I was in at the time). I've never needed the information. It is probably very easy to stumble upon the information now just by consuming popular culture stuff.

This sort of information was probably everywhere in Hoover's time. Women's magazines would have featured such things for the middle class to consume, and some of the poor folks had to know because they worked in upper-class homes and restaurants.

That doesn't help you when you're the one dressing the tables. Which forks do you put? in what order?

That doesn't help you with planning the meal. When do you bring the 7 courses and in what order? Was it 7 courses or something else for that ocassion, can't remember.

And yes I am that guy who had to host fine dining.

The fish knife makes it much easier to separate the flesh from the bones cleanly. But the fork is only there for etiquette indeed.

The weird shape of a fish knife actually has a purpose: it is used for filleting a whole fish. But nowadays it is often presented for use with a fish that has already been filleted and for that it is rather silly.

The reason that you're not supposed to use your regular knife to touch fish (or cut potatoes) is that a non stainless steel knife would tarnish.

A fish knife is silver plated and therefore safe to use.

While my grandparents still had knives that weren't stainless steel, mine would be all safe and the rules now seem arbitrary.

Aside from class-signalling, it's also a benefit to the cutlery manufactuers. Both in expanding the size of a given set, and, by tweaking standards and fashions, by selling additional sets.

It's otherwise difficult to build planned obsolescence into utensils.

The article mentions a ban on "fattened fowl" which I would guess covers foie gras (a tradition that originated in ancient Egypt). California, and Chicago and New York all banned it in the past 15 years, although the California ban is still going through the courts. On another fowl note, eating an Ortolan is pretty much banned everywhere.

Apparently this was because luxury goods were imported and if bought in sufficient quantity lead to draining of money from Rome to the exporting economies and trade routes, essentially supporting potential enemies while weakening local producers and local economy as a whole.

(I think I read this in the Silk Roads book by Peter Frankopan)

This reasoning is effectively what was behind mercantilism. It's why empires didn't extensively trade with one another. Interesting to note that even back then it was an important matter.

We are still the same peoples creating the same kind of problems and think of the same kind of solutions.

It just that technology has decreased the size of the world and has increased the speed at which those problems happen.

It's not quite the same since Adam Smith though. Lifting trade restrictions has correlated with the greatest prosperity known to mankind.

It turns out that if your trade balance makes your currency very cheap then investing in your country also becomes cheap. This increases your (cheaper) production and then increases your exports making your currency more expensive. Ie trade balance tends to balance itself out.

Even if it wasn't in the book i would highly recommend reading The Silk roads by peter Frankopan. Its a nice view of history.

Not garbage. Images of the remnants of elite food.

The article mentions "figs from the middle east", but aren't figs generally available in all of southern Europe?

edit: I meant, haven't they always been?

There are many fig varieties; random article with photos: https://treesofjoy.com/fig-varieties-of-the-middle-east/ .

I assumed they were referring to a variety from the middle east.

its always about the elite and what they like.

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