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The horrors of Pompeii

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Re: The horrors of Pompeii

#91

Post by twelve40 »

defrost wrote: post #76
twelve40 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how come famines were a thing then if this is so easy? 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.

> how come famines were a thing then if this is so easy? 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 continu…

> time & effort humans had to spend on simply acquiring enough calories

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

Re: The horrors of Pompeii

#92

Post by Pigalowda »

brazzy wrote: post #89
dumdumchan wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Janus the fifth" and "KD6-3.7"

That's not at all how it worked. "The fifth slave I bought" and "the fifth son of this super rich senator" would have exactly the same name, Quintus.

Cicero’s less famous brother was named Quintus.

Pompey Magnus had a son, Sextus (6th), that was relatively famous for his opposition to Octavius.

Re: The horrors of Pompeii

#93

Post by tharkun__ »

WalterBright wrote: post #11
bruce511 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why the down-votes, but I will point out they start in late fall, in areas uncolonised by people in 2000 years- which might infer some hint as to the desirability of said location.

They were also severely restricted in what technology they could bring. But they still had fish hooks, survival clothing, advanced bow and arrows, an advanced saw or hatchet, fish line, and fire starter. 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 consid…

If you want to see it done differently watch season 8.

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.

Re: The horrors of Pompeii

#94

Post by dan-robertson »

schmichael wrote: post #34

> Petronius was writing comedy, but there is no reason to dispute the incidental details, which can bring the Lupanar to life. His description suggests brothels would be located in more out-of-the-way parts of town and were not necessarily identifiable from the outside; the prostitutes and punters were screened from the outside world by a curtain. It also reveals that people could be enticed or tricked into visiting…

I don’t know how much you actually disagree with the conclusions: even if the stories are made up by the characters in the comedy, I think the choice of made-up story could give clues about what was plausible, eg in more modern times a story of ‘I ran out of gas and asked to use their phone’ might suggest something about the location.

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.

Re: The horrors of Pompeii

#95

Post by danShumway »

kergonath wrote: post #90
danShumway wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 impositio…

> 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? Isn’t this a straw man, though? Roman art and culture has a very important part in western minds, if only because our…

> But I haven’t seen anyone saying that life was better in the Roman Empire, ever.

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.

Re: The horrors of Pompeii

#96

Post by dan-robertson »

srcthr wrote: post #4
Towaway69 wrote: post #2

Nice read but nothing particular interesting unless one believes we have made progress in the last 2000 years. Hint: we're still just sex crazy monkeys with a liking to power and control over other monkeys.

And of course as is typical of late stage western cultural elitism there are 4000 words on sex and two for the mines. You'd think the place where slave lifespan was measured in years rather than decades would make for a more interesting story. 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 rea…

I’m very confused what your point is? It sounds to me like you either think the topic of this article is so trivial that it shouldn’t have been written or that any article on the time period has to cover everything that happened then. But I don’t really believe either of those could be true.

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.

Re: The horrors of Pompeii

#97

Post by mark_l_watson »

Historian Tom Holland has a good narrative of why the Romans were so different than we are. They believed that the gods favored them, all other cultures were beneath them, and unless women were very wealthy they basically had no rights.

Re: The horrors of Pompeii

#98

Post by kergonath »

danShumway wrote: post #95
kergonath wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Isn’t this a straw man, though? Roman art and culture has a very important part in western minds, if only because our…

> But I haven’t seen anyone saying that life was better in the Roman Empire, ever. 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 hi…

> But then I remember seeing people get weird online about criticisms of Sparta.

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…

* https://acoup.blog/category/collections/this-isnt-sparta

Re: The horrors of Pompeii

#99

Post by steveBK123 »

twelve40 wrote: post #72
defrost wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. https://svacs.libguides.com/c.php?g=933180&p=6746395 How do we know this to be true? There are still aboriginal people alive today that gather fod in…

how come famines were a thing then if this is so easy? 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.

Exactly. You don't have to go back very far to find a lot of famines even in the "developed world".

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!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano_Islands_Act

Re: The horrors of Pompeii

#100

Post by legulere »

hist_thr wrote: post #52
User23 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> life expectancy was usually lower than today 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.

No they really didn't. 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 yea…

A middle age rural village in Germany is not the same as an ancient roman city.
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