The horrors of Pompeii
aeon.co
aeon.co
The article is mostly about slavery and prostitution, colored by modern views of the world. For much of human history, people were simply trying to survive and life expectancy was usually lower than today. A lot of privileged people had lives we would not really envy.
Articles like this usually make no effort to give that kind of context and implicitly compare their worst to our best or average and make it sound intentionally cruel to a greater degree than was probably the case most of the time.
I don't know that the situations of the people who owned slaves matter all that much to the experiences of the slaves.
There are two ways to read this article. One is as a pure imposition of modern views onto the past with the implication that everyone involved should have known better and should have had the perspective and empathy of a modern watcher; the other is as a clarification that, "hey, maybe Rome wasn't always a progressive advanced bastion of civilization that we should emulate, maybe a lot of people (even the privileged of the time) had terrible experiences, and maybe some of the regular glorification of the past that we engage in is misplaced, both materially and morally?"
I'm not sure that your comment contradicts that secondary reading. The past was an unpleasant place to live in for everybody. Particularly if you were a slave. It's a good thing that we've started to walk away from it.
Isn’t this a straw man, though? Roman art and culture has a very important part in western minds, if only because our culture largely descends from theirs. But I haven’t seen anyone saying that life was better in the Roman Empire, ever. Even the enlightenment philosophers, to which we owe things like the American and French revolution and gave to their institutions a Roman-like patina, were well aware of the imperfection of the Roman systems. They knew about the social wars, the Gracchi and the fall of the Republic. And that was in the 1600s and 1700s.
I think that many segments of modern society have a tendency to look at history through rose colored glasses and underrate how awful it was for everyone involved, even when it's couched with "but of course you wouldn't want to actually live there."
But this is tricky to talk about because it's not a universal tendency and it doesn't hit everyone the same way. Some people have a tendency to look at history through the opposite lens as if the people involved in it weren't human beings at all and were too primitive and desperate to have any relatable emotion. And the existence of those people who treat history like it was just a primitive hell is why you tend to see memes about getting scammed by a brass merchant being so popular, because it feels like a very human everyday experience and it contradicts that opposite narrative.
Maybe you haven't ever encountered anyone saying that Rome was the GOAT, I'm not going to say you're wrong about that if that's not your experience. But then I remember seeing people get weird online about criticisms of Sparta. There is a real tendency I see to abstract history in a way that papers over the humanity of the people involved, and I think that pointing out that the people involved were human beings who suffered in human ways that are genuinely horrible (sometimes horrible to such extremes that it is difficult to internalize and empathize with) -- I think that has some value in punching through that instinct in both directions because whether people are glorifying or demonizing history, the thing that unites both of those instincts is the reduction of the people involved to caricatures and actors rather than human beings.
But your millage may vary; I don't know what parts of culture you're embedded in or whether you ever find yourself around people who fall into that trap. Maybe you don't. All I can say is that my experience doesn't match yours, and I do run into people who glorify history, and I do run into people who glorify Rome.
Ah yes, you’re certainly right about those, good point. They are indeed a good example of what you say (and of course their specific kind of delusion has been convincingly shown as divorced from any kind of historical reality *).
> All I can say is that my experience doesn't match yours, and I do run into people who glorify history, and I do run into people who glorify Rome.
Using history for propaganda purposes is not that rare, see e.g. Putin doing it with the old Russian empire right now. But my understanding is that they even the people buying into this are happy to rant about how great their country used to be but would not want to actually live at the time they glorify. Even Russian nationalists know how bad life was for the vast majority of the population under Catherine the Great. It’s usually some aspects they want to emulate, it the whole experience. Of course there is the counter-example you mentioned of spartanophile who have too much confidence in their manliness and toughness and who would not be against raping a helot or killing a wolf every now and then…
Doing all these variations of "sparta lord of the rings GoT blog" and just getting links to IMDB pages...
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Yeah, it's really tricky to talk about this because one of two things can be true:
A) there could actually be a culture of people who need to hear about this and you're just fortunate enough not to be embedded in that culture, or
B) maybe it's the Twitter phenomenon where a news article reads a tweet that was liked 5 times and then makes a controversy about what society believes now. Or maybe I'm embedded in such a narrow sub-culture where I'm more likely to see wild takes about the past.
And it can sometimes be really hard to make a credible argument in either direction. I can't think of any evidence I can give that I see this as a problem other than... anecdotally I see it. But obviously that's not evidence.
Happy to help, I certainly get a lot of mileage from that one:) A convenient one is also the series on the Fremen mirage, which is another trope tough guys like to throw around: https://acoup.blog/category/collections/the-fremen-mirage . It’s actually related to the point you were making. These people like to talk about the fall of Rome and decadence as if what came before was a kind of golden age, but I don’t think their reasoning prowess goes far enough to actually come up with some arguments as to what was better before and why. They are focused on what went bad (disintegration, obviously because men were weak, women were rebellious, and there were immigrants).
> maybe it's the Twitter phenomenon where a news article reads a tweet that was liked 5 times and then makes a controversy about what society believes now. Or maybe I'm embedded in such a narrow sub-culture where I'm more likely to see wild takes about the past.
Yeah, it’s difficult to gauge this sort of things now because Twitter is such an echo chamber, and the most vocal communities are not the largest. I don’t claim to be perfectly informed either, far from it. Imperfect as it is, mainstream media provides a better view, I think. The future will be interesting if Twitter disintegrates.
There's an entire meme format to this effect ("R E T V R N", imitating Latin engravings.)
Too many people have not watched "cannibal warlords of Liberia" so they assume that the worst society today is one sexism and racism.
> cannibal warlords
I bet there used be a whole lot more of those (relatively) and in other countries than Liberia in the past too.
I'm wary of critising historical figures for being racist etc ( e.g.they recently renamed the Hume building in Edinburgh because he had some racists views, which is ridiculous). However I don't think it's possible to paint slavery as ok because it was the style at the time.
There was also a practice of indentured servitude which people seem to see as basically slavery but was more like a loan in an era where money per se was hard to get hold of. In the absence of the ability to borrow money to pay a cost you couldn't cover, you signed over your future labor for a set period.
It was somewhat common for a time for people to immigrate to the US colonies via indentured servitude as a means to pay their passage -- cover the price of the boat to get here -- because they had no other means to pay it.
Similarly, there was an expression of "working off a dead horse" for people who joined the British Navy or similar to pay off a debt. It referred to both paying the debt ("dead horse") and the lousy hard tack they fed you while you had no money for niceties like food you preferred to eat.
For that matter, to this day, joining the military is more like being "owned" than it is like "having a job." So the clear bright line on slavery vs not slavery that many people want to imagine exists doesn't actually exist.
This was exceptionally common back in the day, with there being the obligation to not leave, and is not really like a job though many of today would confuse it as such because they can't comprehend the concept that getting room and board is not the same as getting paid, especially when that's with the ever present threat of being kicked to the curb or beaten depending on the culture.
And in a world where every apple matters, it's not exactly a simple thing to take on an extra mouth, particularly at first when they're usually weak and unable to do much, thus why the enslaved is made to work so hard.
This naturally progresses into abusive systemic norms which weve seen develop in so many societies in history, but really it appears to me they almost all seem to start in a "survival slavery" format.
Life expectancy at birth was lower than today. However those who survived to adulthood had a life expectancy considerably closer to modern ones than most people think. It turns out the massive infant and childhood mortality rates greatly dragged down the average overall life expectancy.
Nope. I see this consistently repeated all over HN or Reddit, but it just isn't true. Only the high clergy routinely reached their late 60s, and trying to analyze general mortality from the relatively sparse ancient records that mostly concerned the richest and most important people introduces enormous biases.
It is the burial grounds that tell the full story without major biases (there still are biases caused by, say, sailors drowning and their bones not being buried on land - a nontrivial cause of death in a maritime imperium). And the bones of average people indicate that over half didn't live to see their 60th birthday until the 19th century.
In some really bad periods (the Dark Ages in Europe), the average buried adult person is in their early forties - a tale of food insecurity and constant raids. Rome, at least, was mostly food secure and had long periods of peace, so celebrating your 50th birthday was very thinkable for a free Roman citizen of non-pauper status.
Edit: someone downvoting this. People, just take any paper about an archeological excavation of an old burial ground and the detected age distribution of the skeletons found. People over 60 are untypical, though always present in all periods until well into the industrial revolution. And early Medieval cemeteries skew a lot younger than either Rome at its height, or the Late Middle Ages with their better agriculture and more capable governments.
https://www.populationpyramid.net/africa/2022/
To compare to a time when slaves were near, surely we must add our poor regions, where people work in mines and factories for us, to our life expectancy. Otherwise we are as much comparing Modern Capitalism to feudalism, etc.
But the current shape of the African population pyramid is partly determined by the baby boom in the last three generations. There were many fewer Africans around in 1963 (which is when people who are now aged 60 were born), so even if they all lived long (which they didn't), their share on the 2023 population would be much lower than in societies which barely reproduce themselves.
For a fast growing population you'll always see a significant narrowing by age no matter if people live long or not.
As far as I know, life expectancy for somebody who reached age of 10 was 36/37. If you include child mortality then life expectancy was in 20s [1][2].
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/3184767
[2] https://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums-static/digitalegypt/age/roman....
For females the risk of death during childhood was about 1% per event. So if you had 8+ children (half of whom died). Divided per 20 years that alone is 5 times or so higher chance to die per year than a 30 year old woman has today (from all causes).
> However those who survived to adulthood had a life expectancy considerably closer to modern ones than most
IIRC based on the data we have that was only the case in parts Colonial New England where a majority of 20 year olds could expect to reach 60+. But that was a huge exception compared to every other agricultural society that we know of.
there are quite a few weasel words in there, but no, they didn't have life expectancy I would envy, even if they survived adulthood.
This is not true and the source of this misconception is a misleading BBC article that only cited sources about the rich privileged elites of ancient Rome and Middle Age England.
The vast majority of people in the past had significantly lower life expectancy than the rich elites of their time.
> When infant mortality is factored out (i.e. counting only the 67–75% who survived the first year), life expectancy is around 34–41 more years (i.e. expected to live to 35–42). When child mortality is factored out (i.e. counting only the 55-65% who survived to age 5), life expectancy is around 40–45 (i.e. age 45–50). The ~50% that reached age 10 could also expect to reach ~45-50; at 15 to ~48–54; at 40 to ~60; at 50 to ~64–68; at 60 to ~70–72; at 70 to ~76–77.
Early 19th century England
> For the 84% who survived the first year (i.e. excluding infant mortality), the average age was ~46–48. If they reached 20, then it was ~60; if 50, then ~70; if 70, then ~80. For a 15-year-old girl it was ~60–65. For the upper-class, LEB rose from ~45 to 50.
Less than half of the people born in the mid-19th century made it past their 50th birthday. In contrast, 97% of the people born in 21st century England and Wales can expect to live longer than 50 years.
The 20th and 21st century havd been revolutionary from a medical point of view.
Both because of a significant decrease in taxation but mostly because the plague, climate change and warfare killed half or so killed half of the people living in Europe at the time.
The same thing happened in the 1300s and 1400s as the number of people decreases significantly the quality of life for those who remained increased (more land per capita).
Additionally there were significant technological developments during the middle ages which resulted in higher crop yields (especially in northern Europe) (heavy plow, horse collars, wind mills, more water mills, 3 and later 4 field crop rotation, general improvements in metallurgy...
This is what the age pyramid looks like for a first world nation: https://www.populationpyramid.net/finland/2022/
It's a column until you reach 70 then people start dying.
This is what the age pyramid looks like for a society stuck in the Malthusian trap: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XfdbjKDGvT0/Ti49-5r5EyI/AAAAAAAAB...
Notice how people have a half life, the chance of dying when you reach 20 years in any year is 5% regardless of age.
Especially after the plague would have been a much nicer place to live for most people than an average ancient Roman city (or even Rome itself given that's its population was only sustainable because of immigration)
“No reason to dispute”? Surely the most obvious explanation for a scene about recognizing someone in a brothel and both claiming to have been “tricked” is that at least one of them is lying, and poorly at that?
It seems just as plausible to me that the brothel was very obviously marked and so the idea that anyone could be tricked into going there unaware would be a hilarious joke.
I obviously don’t know either, but I just wish historical articles wouldn’t act so certain about things they offer no proof of!
I think if you want something more rigorous, you can probably find it, but you won’t be so likely to find it in general-interest articles like this one. It may be that there is more context in the play that isn’t mentioned, and the description is meant to be illustrative rather than like a mathematics paper quoting a theorem that is to be relied on later. Or perhaps the conclusion is synthesised from many sources but only one is illustrated because the purpose of the article is trying to describe what is thought about the past rather than trying to prove those things. The article has lots of links to sources, which is commendable, and I think you could look there first if you want stronger evidence.
I watched a documentary one or two years ago about the coliseum in Rome, and it made me realize that what we claim to know about those ancient times must be 80% bullshit.
It was all assumptions built on top of assumptions, themselves built on top of suppositions without any proof.
When I was a kid I wanted to become an archeologist, but this one documentary that basically put in evidence that everything is just bullshit where we have picked the most convenient explanation completely disinterested me from archeology forever.
Now if you only wanted to rent her for half an hour and have a pair of donkeys you don't need in the meantime, hey, I've got an idea. It's like Uber for donkeys, and we're going to build it on the eDonkey network...
A man drowning in the dark, trapped by a rock fall, seeing the crushed head of his foreman on the left and his best friend running on the right.
But that would mean forcing readers to imagine a life where economics and not perversion were the driving force of history and we can't have that.
Edit: I submit "Alone", the TV show where survival experts are dumped out in the wilderness one by one, where they all starve and eventually get pulled out for losing dangerous amounts of weight. And this is despite bringing along survival gear made by an advanced economy.
Only one was able to make fire without a fire starter. After watching Alone, I bought myself a fire starter, to carry when hiking.
I remember one father/son team. The son had some sort of fisheries degree, and considered himself a fishing expert. Father and son would fish, the father caught fish regularly, the son couldn't catch one. A lot of the fishing experts turned out to be not so good at fishing, the same for the hunting experts.
What's kinda sad is how bad most were at building shelters. They'd spend all their calories building a magnificent log cabin, and then were too weak to continue. Season after season they'd do this. Or they'd spend time carving toys. Or they'd burn down their shelter with a bad fireplace or poison themselves with the smoke.
The point is, humans have evolved to need an economy for mutual survival. Can't realistically do it alone, from scratch.
Spoiler alert: the winner built a simple hut, shows how to do it on his YouTube channel afterwards too. With a properly chimneyed fireplace though he had to improvise because his area did not have enough clay in the soil.
He's had the channel for a long time. I knew his channel before. His bow was a simple longbow he made himself. He regularly goes elk and boar hunting with his bows. He also tried fishing but had a bad spot but got lucky encountering a deer. He built a smoker with an automatic bear alarm. They really don't show a lot of him on the show if you compare. I think basically because he just did so well overall. He did carve toys to bring back to his sons too.
It's season 10 now, and they're back to making spectacular log cabins and then tapping out!
What's funny is how good that one first season guy was at doing everything, especially shelter, and then after only a couple days to have an indefinite setup, just missed his wife and immediately left. "Everything looks good, just don't have Barbara!"
Seems expected when you consider that most people have never built a shelter, and those that have aren't often doing it on a regular basis using whatever happens to be lying around. Same for fishers and hunters who are highly skilled in the environments they regularly work in. You can only expect them to struggle when placed in new environments with new added restrictions. You'd just hope they'd struggle a bit less than an novice would in that situation.
The most consistent failure was in way overestimating their ability to do hard physical labor without food.
It's clear from watching the show that the path to victory, given woodcraft skills, is doing as little physical exertion as possible. Build a minimal shelter, spend all the rest of the effort obtaining food.
P.S. I wouldn't last a week on that show.
P.P.S. Anyone building a shelter out of 8" dia logs is doomed.
Normally, Aboriginal groups were easily able to find enough food for their entire clan in three or four hours of hunting and gathering each day. They know which fruit and animals are available at certain times, how to gather or hunt successfully and how to store foods.
How do we know this to be true?
There are still aboriginal people alive today that gather fod in the traditional manner - when I was 20 or so the Pintupi Nine wandered in, some stayed a few left and returned to the desert.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30500591
There are still many people living hybrid lives, using modern metals and traditional knowledge to gather food, eg:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gmCX7R-W4c
A key point here is 30+ thousand years of getting to know and shaping the landscape - promoting plants and animals over others, learning the movements and habits of animals, seasons of plants, not having closed in winters, etc.
my guess is that you probably picked a particular sparsely living group in particular favorable climate that eventually probably got wiped out by a hungrier group.
furthermore, hunting for three hours no freaking way can sustain population density of say Indonesia, or some other Asian countries which have been populous for many centuries.
What infomation do you have on pre European landing famine in Australia?
> my guess is that you probably picked a particular sparsely living group
The Swan Valley quote above applied to Western Australian and Central Desert groups prior to being shunted off traditional lands by European settlement (an area comfortably three times larger than Texas) - it continues to apply in areas where traditional practices on traditional lands continue.
https://mgnsw.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/map_col_high...
> that eventually probably got wiped out by a hungrier group.
Recent genetics has confirmed what was also the local oral history, that people arrived, fanned out, and stayed where they first settled:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature21416
This runs contrary to the views espoused for decades by Windshuttle in Quadrant.
> furthermore, hunting for three hours no freaking way can sustain population density of say Indonesia
?? Pre Dutch contact Indonesia ?
I specifically linked to the example of Australian hunter gathers.
You can take it that my earlier comment doesn't apply to Iñupiat, Yupik, Aleut, Eyak, Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, etc peoples of Alaska.
so you are reducing "humans" in the comment you are replying to, to Western Australian and Central Desert groups? that's not the majority of humans, who really did have to fight for calories
Look back in history before the invention of nitrogen fertilizers (only about a century ago).. we spent nearly a century harvesting guano off uninhabited rock islands in order to produce fertilizer & gun powder. We even past laws to encourage it!
A large portion would be fine. Maybe unhappy, maybe not, but they'd survive. Most people are completely clueless about how little "Mother" nature gives a shit. The outdoors will kill you very quickly, especially if you're alone. If you have even just a small group of people, the odds change drastically.
Deep Survival is a great read. I picked that up from it.
Human infants will die without physical touch. We are social creatures by our DNA.
The worst punishment in older times was banishment. It was usually a death sentence.
Yup. Bob is good at making gill nets, Ted is good at gathering berries. Fred is good at making a cabin. Sam is good at bow hunting. They trade their surpluses. A small economy. None have the skills needed to go it alone.
Yet the idea of a "self-made millionaire" is pervasive and people were pretty quick to hate on the "You didn't build that" observation.
Any surplus left over is yours, and yes, you did build that.
Any failure (and 80% of businesses fail within 5 years) you own the failure and its debts, too. The people who you paid for their services, you still owe any unpaid debt to them.
You'll also discover that you couldn't have done any of it alone. That your business would have been impossible without your education, which involved countless others, or the roads and bridges built by others, or the internet which was built by others, or the investors and banks who gave you the money to get your business started which were built by others. Even the things you paid for directly and upfront, but which your business absolutely depended on were built by someone else and any success you have would not have been possible if they hadn't done all the work needed to get to where they could provide you with what your business needed from them.
That's the point. Nobody does it alone, because that would be impossible. As the man said "The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together."
That also means we fail together too. If you borrow a bunch of money to start a business and can't pay it back, that burden isn't just on you. The employees who depended on your business for their income also carry some of the burden of your failure. The customers who depended on you are also impacted. At a larger scale, when a business fails, we all lose out on what could have been if it hadn't. Our economy loses diversity. Most new businesses will fail, but the failures are never just about one person either. In fact, many times the things others have built, including the environment a business operates in, are a direct cause of that business failing.
Investors don't give you money. They buy a piece of the business. Banks don't give you money, either. You have to pay the loan back, with interest.
BTW, employee back wages have first dibs on your assets should you declare bankruptcy. The back wages won't be much, anyway, as the law is pretty specific that a business cannot be late on payday.
And millions of others are highly skilled, talented, intelligent, hardworking, and creative, but don't all find success.
This is why luck plays a massive role in the success of any business. That doesn't mean things like skills and initiative aren't important, or that people can't shift the odds in their favor (see for example https://fictivekin.github.io/pmarchive-jekyll/luck_and_the_e...) but ultimately, some people who should succeed don't because they were unlucky and others who do succeed would have failed if things entirely out of their control just happened to go differently.
> Investors don't give you money. They buy a piece of the business. Banks don't give you money, either.
Banks and investors give you money, with the expectation that they'll profit by doing so, but more to the point they give you opportunity. Plenty of people get turned away by banks and investors and if they manage to pull enough money together to get started they can still succeed, but others fail because without that opportunity given to them, they couldn't even get things off the ground.
Employees lose a lot more when their job is lost than just the wages they are owed (which they also don't always get) especially the ones who took more risky forms of compensation, but even outside the realm of compensation there are costs.
Isn't the success of those people so unfair and undeserved?
If you paid a contractor to remodel your bathroom, and then sold your house for a higher price, is the contractor entitled to a piece of that action?
I’m sure an article about the horrors of being a slave in a Roman mine would do fine, it’s just that it probably wouldn’t be able to rely on archaeology in Pompeii, which had little relation to mining. There was an article from a typical ‘western cultural elitism’ outlet that did well here and elsewhere recently about terrible conditions faced by illegal miners in abandoned South African mines, so I really don’t think the reason for the focus is preferences about topic so much as, you know, that you can have different articles about different things.
Can anyone explain this?
Slave names were sometimes numbers. Naming conventions in Roman culture were apparently also fairly formal.[0] I would guess there's sufficient evidence here that a ratio of free to slave could be estimated.
In general, it seems like being a slave was not a great experience.[1]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome#Treatm...
[1]: among other stories, the one concerning the murder of Lucius Pedanius Secundus sticks in my mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Pedanius_Secundus
It was definitely frowned upon.
Senators' and emperors' names were quite often numbers.
That is definitely not the distinction you're looking for.
"The fifth slave I bought" and "the fifth son of this super rich senator" would have exactly the same name, Quintus.
Pompey Magnus had a son, Sextus (6th), that was relatively famous for his opposition to Octavius.
You're thinking along the lines of generational suffixes? There were Roman emperors who's family name (nomen gentilicium) was a number, the same number being used by son, father, grandfather... not incrementing with each generation.
There were also Roman emperors who's fathers had been slaves.
Lucius Septimius Severus - family name means 7th
Publius Helvius Pertinax - family name means honey-yellow. Son of a freed slave.
Presumably a portion could have been previously slaves who earned their freedom; and maybe even some who chose it as a line of work as free women initially
You know a medical doctor who left medicine and is working as a prostitute because it pays more?
What country if you don't mind me asking?
Given the low birthrates in many countries around the world, I'm not so sure this is true anymore.