The horrors of Pompeii • Hacker News Board

Re: The horrors of Pompeii

#101

Post by danShumway » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 2:37 PM UTC

kergonath wrote: post #98

danShumway wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

:) Oh I'm so glad you linked that, because I was trying to find that same blog series and couldn't figure out the right phrase to search, and I was so mad that I hadn't bookmarked it when I originally ran into it.

Doing all these variations of "sparta lord of the rings GoT blog" and just getting links to IMDB pages...

---

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.

Re: The horrors of Pompeii

#102

Post by User23 » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 2:49 PM UTC

inglor_cz wrote: post #84

Dah00n wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this different to today in countries not living the good life because they have exported slavery to other countries? Africa for example seem worse off than what you wrote. Around 1% at 60: 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 muc…

What you say is partly true, partly not. Africans definitely die earlier. 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 societ…

Has there truly been an African baby boom, or is it that the birth rate has remained stable-ish and the survival rate has skyrocketed?

Re: The horrors of Pompeii

#103

Post by kergonath » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 3:00 PM UTC

danShumway wrote: post #101

kergonath wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

:) Oh I'm so glad you linked that, because I was trying to find that same blog series and couldn't figure out the right phrase to search, and I was so mad that I hadn't bookmarked it when I originally ran into it. Doing all these variations of "sparta lord of the rings GoT blog" and just getting links to IMDB pages... --- Yeah, it's really tricky to talk about this because one of two things can be true: A) there coul…

> :) Oh I'm so glad you linked that, because I was trying to find that same blog series and couldn't figure out the right phrase to search, and I was so mad that I hadn't bookmarked it when I originally ran into it.

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.

Re: The horrors of Pompeii

#104

Post by pipes » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 3:16 PM UTC

DoreenMichele wrote: post #33

Graffiti is one of the most exciting kinds of evidence preserved for us by the destruction of Pompeii, because it comes not from the literature of the elite, or the inscriptions of the powerful, but from a wider cross-section of society. 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 us…

What context would excuse slavery? Everyone was at it so it was ok? Under certain circumstances it was ok?

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.

Re: The horrors of Pompeii

#105

Post by truculent » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 5:57 PM UTC

mcpackieh wrote: post #60

truculent wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Middle Ages is not Rome. I think it’s plausible that Roman society would fare better

100 years ago was not the Middle Ages, that ended about 500 years ago. 100 years ago is the late modern period.

I think I replied to the wrong comment. My mistake.

Re: The horrors of Pompeii

#106

Post by inglor_cz » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 6:29 PM UTC

User23 wrote: post #102

inglor_cz wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you say is partly true, partly not. Africans definitely die earlier. 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 societ…

Has there truly been an African baby boom, or is it that the birth rate has remained stable-ish and the survival rate has skyrocketed?

I suspect it is a bit of this and a bit of that. It is not just child mortality, but mother mortality (during/after birth) which plummeted with better medicine, thus the same amount of women can bear more children.

Re: The horrors of Pompeii

#107

Post by qwytw » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 6:59 PM UTC

legulere wrote: post #100

hist_thr wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> middle age rural village in Germany

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)

Re: The horrors of Pompeii

#108

Post by kwk1 » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 7:08 PM UTC

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.

There's an entire meme format to this effect ("R E T V R N", imitating Latin engravings.)

Re: The horrors of Pompeii

#109

Post by qwytw » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 7:31 PM UTC

lelanthran wrote: post #67

DoreenMichele wrote: post #33

Graffiti is one of the most exciting kinds of evidence preserved for us by the destruction of Pompeii, because it comes not from the literature of the elite, or the inscriptions of the powerful, but from a wider cross-section of society. 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 us…

Yeah, I think they should be comparing the worst of the past with the worst of today. Too many people have not watched "cannibal warlords of Liberia" so they assume that the worst society today is one sexism and racism.

Maybe the median would make more sense? At least the 80-90th percentiles?

> cannibal warlords

I bet there used be a whole lot more of those (relatively) and in other countries than Liberia in the past too.

Re: The horrors of Pompeii

#110

Post by qwytw » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 7:45 PM UTC

User23 wrote: post #38

DoreenMichele wrote: post #33

Graffiti is one of the most exciting kinds of evidence preserved for us by the destruction of Pompeii, because it comes not from the literature of the elite, or the inscriptions of the powerful, but from a wider cross-section of society. 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 us…

> 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.

Even for males in the 20 to 30s in pre modern societies the chance of death (ignoring violence etc.) was several times higher than now.

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.