Life for the Lowest Class in Ancient Pompeii? It Was Awful
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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Being sent "ad minam" was basically a slow-motion death sentence and everyone involved knew it.
Any examples of regions of the world where things are as bad as that? I've travelled a bit and seen nothing like that.
https://www.antislavery.org/latest/report-slavery-india-bric...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/31/the-dark-side-...
https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/top-cobalt-produci...
That said, horrific working conditions abound in today's modern world, another example being "call centre coolies", eg:
Inside the call centre scam that lured vulnerable workers to Cambodia and trapped them in the murky world of human trafficking
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-29/inside-call-centre-sc...
these places pop up all over the globe.
... and living conditions for most Congolese are still better than they used to be, even for the lowest 10%.
Not that it’s a fair comparison modern medicine and some (even on a minimal level) access to healthcare means that the majority of people who are alive now would’ve been dead.
Of course that’s certainly not the only thing.
People who work as "servants" have cheap cell phones, TVs, and some commute to work on cycles and motorized vehicles.
There are pockets, of course, where what you say holds, but in aggregate, the lives of the bottom x% are probably better than their (our) distant forefathers due to commoditized conveniences that we take for granted.
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/immunizatio...
Stuff costs.
For every advantage a person receives, someone above them will leverage it for their own benefit. Increased productivity from automation does not flow toward fewer hours for the same pay but to increased output for the same pay - or perhaps to less pay when forced out of their career.
Vaccine-lengthened lives are spent working more years to survive, typically at less than ideal jobs.
The gadgets you tick off (in context that infers they a measure life improvement) come with costs.
Where time is saved, expectations are increased to fill that time. This trend has led us to a state where ordinary lives are massively more complex. Routine events have many more steps and requirements.
Gadgets themselves are conduits for rent-seeking exploitation, which requires still more resources from a finite pool.
Predictably, society has a growing need for mental health services. Some areas have services for those who are overtaxed and without resources. Many areas do not - despite widespread signaling that mental health services universally available.
However, I can agree that the advantages you mention are serving to get us where we are.
For example, my mother still remembers how it was to do laundry before washing mashines. Washing sheets generally took most of the day and was filled with manual labor. That's how women spend every third or fourth Sunday back then (had to be Sunday, because they were working in a job on the other six days of the week), before they could finally afford a washing machine.
You're discussing gadget-derived, quality of life improvements. Those are time savings, as you exampled.
>For example, my mother still remembers how it was to do laundry before washing machines. Washing sheets generally took most of the day and was filled with manual labor.
Anyway, along with no net gains in discretionary time there are tremendous increases in complexity to ordinary living. We've wound up being far more taxed than we were before.
If we focus exclusively on the gain=n without including the inevitable cost=n2, we get an unhelpful overview of what we're up against.
While also receiving a lot more (sometime massively more) services from the state.
that's an odd comparison, there were no vaccines in ancient Pompeii, but they had fresh running water everywhere, they had a fully working well maintained sewage system, they had fully working well maintained piping system, they had fully working and well maintained infrastructures, such as roads, public buildings, public baths, markets, they had access to high quality food, they had very low crime levels (compared to the period of course), people were protected from outsiders by a fully working well equipped army, the State was present and vigilant, there was virtually no kind of organized crime syndicate running things locally, like modern Camorra, something that's not true anymore not in some poor of the poorest land, but in Italy in 2023 in the same areas where Pompeii was.
Go and see how they live in Scampia and you'll be shocked how backwards society went over time.
Perfect place for spreading diseases.
> had access to high quality food,
The economic elite probably did. Everyone else? Unlikely, especially not consistently. Most people were dirt poor by modern standards (no real equivalent in the western world)
> no kind of organized crime syndicate running things locally
We know that how? The whole patron-client system was essentially that. also why do you claim that state was “ was present and vigilant”? As far as we know that’s certainly a silly claim if we compare it to modern Italy.
having the sewage and water systems was was pretty cool pf course by premodern standards. But almost everyone still had to use communal fountains or latrines unless they were slaves in some rich person’s mansion.
First of all I was talking about thermal baths were bacteria do not survive anyway.
But secondly, Romans did not know antibiotics or bacteria or how infections worked, we do and still there are several outbreaks every year in almost every "first world" country.
Do I need to remind you about COVID?
People still do not wash their hands and it helped a global pandemic spread.
So in the end things were definitely not worse when preventive measures were a lot worse and a lot of the knowledge about how disease spread was a mystery.
But they were a lot cheaper and better maintained compared to today.
If we were putting the same effort 2 thousand years later, we should be living in a literal heaven.
> Everyone else? Unlikely
More than they do today. One would think that 2 thousand years later the situation should be much better, and yet it's not.
Again: look at the e-coli outbreak in the US, the richest country in the World, in 2022 and 2023, not in 312 B.C.
Ancient Romans could not preserve food, so it was fresh by definition except the kind of food they could dry up (salted or air dried) or keep in oil (olive oil, which was popular in every Mediterranean ancient culture)
> We know that how?
It's called history, you might be surprised how many things we can learn by studying it.
There were elites who could get away with a lot and did a lot of shady stuff, but definitely nothing of to the kind of the organized crime we know today as mafia or cartels.
The greatest threat were pirates, who, as the name implies, only attacked ships sailing in the open sea. Which was already a very risky activity on its own back then.
Large Roman bathhouses had multiple pools with different temperatures.
> Romans did not know antibiotics or bacteria or how infections worked
That’s kind of my entire point. The overall quality of life is much better because of what we know.
> d better maintained compared to today.
I’m not sure what saunas or swimming pools you go to but I certainly don’t believe that they are as dirty and unmaintained in general as you’re implying.
> If we were putting the same effort 2 thousand years later, we should be living in a literal heaven.
I think that by ancient standards we do (in the developed world). Humans are just very adaptable.
> but definitely nothing of to the kind of the organized crime we know today as mafia or cartels.
Because most things modern criminal organizations engage in were actually legal back then. Some of stuff they do now were just standard practices in the Roman society, which was structured a lot like the mafia organizations were back in the 1800s (a lot less secrecy than now).
> The greatest threat were pirates, who, as the name implies, only attacked ships sailing in the open sea.
Romans were generally pretty afraid of being kidnapped and sold into slavery even when traveling on land. In cities gangs and organized crime were certainly a huge issue in poorer parts of the city of Rome as far as we know.
> things we can learn by studying it
you’re right... I’d suggest you get some books not meant for 8 year olds if you’re really interested in the field. They might not paint such a straightforward picture you seem to have in your head, though
Anyway, it’s quite funny that we’re arguing about this. A very weird position to take by you considering most people back in those days lived in such horribly abject conditions you seem to be somehow incapable of comprehending.
And politically and socially too. In comparison to the Roman empire all but the very extreme modern authoritarian regimes would seem like egalitarian utopias (if we focus on human rights and the rule of law).
It's not much better, it could be much better. But on average it is not, compared to the living standards of the Planet Romans were much better of than many are today in the richest Country in the World.
Besides, what really changed is the impact of war on the population, not much of the rest.
And yes, medical advancements, which are not equally shared though, even though they should be a human right by now.
> Because most things modern criminal organizations engage in were actually legal back then
It was harder for them to be formed, it was mostly small bands of bandits outside the city walls.
Weapons, for example, were very expensive and very much controlled.
> which was structured a lot like the mafia organizations
[citation needed]
> Romans were generally pretty afraid of being kidnapped and sold into slavery even when traveling on land
same thing happens in 2023 in Southern Italy to immigrants. It's just hidden from public opinion.
OTOH not many people traveled on land back then, most were born and died in the same plot of land, without ever seeing nothing else in their lives.
> In cities gangs and organized crime were certainly a huge issue in poorer parts of the city of Rome as far as we know.
I happen to live in the place that was called Suburra, precisely were the Argiletum was.
It was the part of the city dedicated to brothels and lower income classes in general, but also where Julius Caesar built his domus.
So, you know, not the kind of neighbourhood one would bring their kids to, but if you think about it, is Downtown LA any better today? At least the Suburra was surrounded by some of the most important monuments and public services of the time and the most popular today (the Colosseum, the Capitolium, the Forum of Caesar, the Forum of Augustus, Trajan's Forum, the Quirinal Hill etc etc)
Is there something as iconic in Downtown LA today? to counter balance being 12 times as dangerous as the national average.
> A very weird position to take by you considering most people back in those days lived in such horribly abject conditions
Is this really your argument?
Who's the 8 year old boy, actually?
you don't seem to understand the concept of context, yes, they were abject by modern standards, but they were a very high standard of living back then.
And that standard was more equally distributed then, than it is today.
I'm Italian BTW, the problem is not the people living in Scampia, the problem is the fact that a place like Scampia exists and everybody there thinks it's normal.
The Romans would have never allowed something like that. Their slaves had better lives than that.
That’s either sarcasm or you certainly know almost absolutely nothing about how the Romans treated their slaves. You could try looking up the conditions of slaves working in mines or agricultural estates or some of the laws related to slavery they had… (also sexual exploitation was on a whole other level which is hard to even grasp for us)
> Scampia
I’m sure it’s much nicer that some of the slums in Ancient Rome, the city itself (Pompeii and Herculaneum were relatively well off cities at the time in probably one the richest regions in the world (Campania))
You seem to be one that makes a lot of assumptions.
> I’m sure it’s much nicer that some of the slums in Ancient Rome
That's the point. It is not.
> Pompeii and Herculaneum were relatively well off cities
Yeah, Egypt was too, Middle East was too, Persia (Iran) too.
Look at them now.
https://www.ft.com/video/140c3fa5-a3c1-438b-9601-e92ad0e1b39...
"The donkeys were no better off: “Their flanks were cut to the bone from relentless whipping, their hoofs distorted to strange dimensions from the repetitive circling, and their whole hide blotched by mange and hollowed by starvation.”
From Book IX of “The Golden Ass” by the second-century author Apuleius
That's what this post is.