The Ancient Romans used a sponge on a stick for washing themselves after defecating. I always wondered who was responsible for cleaning and replacing those sponges in public latrines.
They used the three shells to clean the sponges.
What were the worst jobs for poor Romans in Ancient Rome?
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Re: What were the worst jobs for poor Romans in Ancient Rome?
#12One thing, it's ambiguous if they are speaking of only jobs inside the city, or any job in the republic/empire. It's also ambiguous if this is limited to jobs only performed by free individuals. Some things that didn't make the list. * Free individuals sometimes became Gladiators * While very clean for ancient standards, their sewage system required a lot of manual maintenance. * We know sailors we subject to scurvy,…
Mining was among the worst types of work with very little chance of doing it for longer. Which is why it was allmost only slaves doing it, like most of the other hard work, which is why there allways needed to be new wars to get new slaves to keep the system running.
Re: What were the worst jobs for poor Romans in Ancient Rome?
#13Please dont post quora links.
Whilst the questions and answers might be interesting, the whole site its just a minefield of ads, SEO spam, forced logins, etc…
Re: What were the worst jobs for poor Romans in Ancient Rome?
#14How did rich people keep their wealth? Interesting, they had banking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banking_in_ancient_Rome
Sometimes those bankers were disrupted by Judeans coming in an smashing up the nice open plan lending atriums. Really need the firm hand of government to prevent repeat offending
Re: What were the worst jobs for poor Romans in Ancient Rome?
#15Please dont post quora links. Whilst the questions and answers might be interesting, the whole site its just a minefield of ads, SEO spam, forced logins, etc…
The complete downfall of quora is surprising tbh.
Trying to cash out before they reached critical point? At one point about a decade ago through my spotty memory they are pretty on par with reddit in terms of adoption and reputation.
Re: What were the worst jobs for poor Romans in Ancient Rome?
#16One thing, it's ambiguous if they are speaking of only jobs inside the city, or any job in the republic/empire. It's also ambiguous if this is limited to jobs only performed by free individuals. Some things that didn't make the list. * Free individuals sometimes became Gladiators * While very clean for ancient standards, their sewage system required a lot of manual maintenance. * We know sailors we subject to scurvy,…
Farming is the big one - if your job sucked too hard you’d just go back to being a subsistence farmer like most everyone else.
Was arable land easy to come by for a poor Roman or would you be more likely to have a landlord requiring some cut?
Re: What were the worst jobs for poor Romans in Ancient Rome?
#17"Mining" is rarely the wrong answer for worst job in any premodern era. Incredibly taxing physically, dangerous, claustrophobic, and with the constant risk of fire and being buried alive. The only silver lining for ancient miners was that they had little chance of living long enough to experience the long-term toxic effects of their vocation.
It’s definitely mining for Rome, mining was done more or less exclusively by slaves and life expectancy was short.
Re: What were the worst jobs for poor Romans in Ancient Rome?
#18One thing, it's ambiguous if they are speaking of only jobs inside the city, or any job in the republic/empire. It's also ambiguous if this is limited to jobs only performed by free individuals. Some things that didn't make the list. * Free individuals sometimes became Gladiators * While very clean for ancient standards, their sewage system required a lot of manual maintenance. * We know sailors we subject to scurvy,…
Legionnaire :)
Re: What were the worst jobs for poor Romans in Ancient Rome?
#19Please dont post quora links. Whilst the questions and answers might be interesting, the whole site its just a minefield of ads, SEO spam, forced logins, etc…
The complete downfall of quora is surprising tbh. Trying to cash out before they reached critical point? At one point about a decade ago through my spotty memory they are pretty on par with reddit in terms of adoption and reputation.
Quora has fulfilled its purpose of generating training data for large language models, by answering the majority of questions people have ever thought to search for on the premise of "I wonder if anyone's asked this question before." Now that ChatGPT has read all the answers, Quora can fade into the sunset while ChatGPT regurgitates its answers with precision as part of an ad-free conversation.
Re: What were the worst jobs for poor Romans in Ancient Rome?
#20Please dont post quora links. Whilst the questions and answers might be interesting, the whole site its just a minefield of ads, SEO spam, forced logins, etc…
The complete downfall of quora is surprising tbh. Trying to cash out before they reached critical point? At one point about a decade ago through my spotty memory they are pretty on par with reddit in terms of adoption and reputation.
To me it became unbearable after it became flooded with people trying to add content without bringing any actual insight. They'd largely reuse existing materials or top google/wikipedia results and used certain style that became annoying to me (I wonder if others also started noticing the 'quora-style' answers)