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How much did a tunic cost in the Roman Empire? (2021)

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Re: How much did a tunic cost in the Roman Empire? (2021)

#111

Post by pomian »

lumost wrote: post #4
hprotagonist wrote: post #2

Something that continually just blows my mind is how new spinning wheels are. The most plausible range of time of arrival of the wheel in European contexts is between the mid-1200s to about 1340, which means that textiles produced previously to that were made with drop spindles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spindle_(textiles)#Hand_spindl... That includes things like clothing, but it also includes more staggering ide…

It’s curious, if you go back in time far enough with all knowledge from the present, you’d surely arrive at a point where you still need to work your entire life to bring one component of one innovation to life. Even then, the innovation would be unlikely to survive your death due to other missing parts of the supply chain. Try building a musket in Ancient Greece, you’d need to start with building the steel supply ch…

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court. A novel by Mark Twain. it is really fun.

Re: How much did a tunic cost in the Roman Empire? (2021)

#112

Post by AdamN »

Zababa wrote: post #108
rolleiflex wrote: post #51

Not the author, don't know him, no connection – but I caught a glimpse somewhere on the blog that he is currently unemployed. As an open-source maintainer, I feel like it is my duty to plug him so he can perhaps get some patrons or donations, the blog is great. https://www.bookandsword.com/support/ He is also not a software engineer or in tech in any meaningful way, so his 'tip to total income' ratio is probably off…

> As an aside, now that everybody is asking for 'tips' of some sort, it is getting quite difficult to figure out for whom these tips are essential (i.e. him) and for whom they are just gratuities. I wish I had a good answer for this. That's a good point. On twitter, I see very often people asking for money for a surgery, an accident, or just in general. I feel like I see this way more often than before, but I don't h…

Your online social milieu is likely getting poorer over time. In the olden days, online meeting grounds like Twitter were elite locations. Now they're commons. I notice this the most on Reddit where I'm sometimes reminded how many blue collar people there are (and also what a wide age range exists there).

Re: How much did a tunic cost in the Roman Empire? (2021)

#113

Post by ch4s3 »

missedthecue wrote: post #52
ch4s3 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that someone on a laborers salary could afford the material standard of people in much of the world today would be astonishing. My own grandmother grew up wearing clothes made from repurposed flour sacks, and that was only 90 years ago. The last two centuries of human progress are staggering to think about.

flour and grain companies used to put floral designs on their sacks because they knew that buyers would repurpose the bags as clothing. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/4b/80/d6/4b80d65a7d8ebf737eed...

Yeah, that's a pretty neat bit of history. I wish I had some photos but alas the oldest photo of them I'm aware of is sometime after WWII.

Re: How much did a tunic cost in the Roman Empire? (2021)

#114

Post by lumost »

retrac wrote: post #19
lumost wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s curious, if you go back in time far enough with all knowledge from the present, you’d surely arrive at a point where you still need to work your entire life to bring one component of one innovation to life. Even then, the innovation would be unlikely to survive your death due to other missing parts of the supply chain. Try building a musket in Ancient Greece, you’d need to start with building the steel supply ch…

Yes, you wouldn't be building a steam engine with the tools of Greek artisans in antiquity, not even the ones who built the Antikythera mechanism. But we do know some things that would seem like crazy hacks to the ancients. For example, I know a simple trick. I can multiply numbers, of arbitrary size. And I can do it in a few seconds using just a stylus and tablet. This would have blown the minds of a learned Roman o…

An Ancient greek or Roman would have lacked paper. Using the available paper on arithmetic would have been seen as an inordinate waste of dies and paper.

Re: How much did a tunic cost in the Roman Empire? (2021)

#115

Post by baxtr »

AdamN wrote: post #112
Zababa wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As an aside, now that everybody is asking for 'tips' of some sort, it is getting quite difficult to figure out for whom these tips are essential (i.e. him) and for whom they are just gratuities. I wish I had a good answer for this. That's a good point. On twitter, I see very often people asking for money for a surgery, an accident, or just in general. I feel like I see this way more often than before, but I don't h…

Your online social milieu is likely getting poorer over time. In the olden days, online meeting grounds like Twitter were elite locations. Now they're commons. I notice this the most on Reddit where I'm sometimes reminded how many blue collar people there are (and also what a wide age range exists there).

Yeah, that's a trend. I think it's also the main underlying reason why Google results are getting worse (worse for elites like us...).

Re: How much did a tunic cost in the Roman Empire? (2021)

#116

Post by [deleted] »

Someone wrote: post #93
bregma wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plucking sheep. You shear sheep, not pluck them. If you're experienced you can sheer about 100 sheep per day. You can skirt and wash the fleece of those same 100 sheep on day two. How are you spending the remaining 598 days? While I'm not an expert at spinning (although my spouse may be), I would venture that 12 or 15 village women carding and spinning 10 to 12 hours a day would be able to go from sheep to sail in ab…

Shearing requires advanced technology that the Vikings may not have had. https://www.griggsagri.co.uk/blog/sheep-shearing-a-brief-his... : “The sheep were shorn using very basic tools, such as metal, or sharp glass, fashioned into an implement to take whole clumps of wool off at once. Over time, the tools were adapted into scissor-like blades to make the job easier.” I think you can call that plucking. People use too…

[deleted]

Re: How much did a tunic cost in the Roman Empire? (2021)

#117

Post by mywittyname »

xyzzyz wrote: post #63
KineticLensman wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but a large low pressure steam engine is perfectly possible. Irrespective of whether it was possible for the Greeks to make them, what would be the economic incentive for them to build large low pressure steam engines at scale? In our timeline, the only serious application of large low pressure steam engines was pumping water out of mines, from after 1720 or so. Even with the incentive of the industrial revolution,…

Milling grain, hammering wrought iron, crushing ore etc. There were plenty of uses of mechanized power even in antiquity, and the ancients realized that through use of water wheels.

I don't think the OP is saying that there wasn't a need for mechanized power, just that it wasn't profitable to get that power from steam.

Water wheels have no fuel costs, and very little ongoing maintenance costs. A steam engine that could be built in antiquity would be incredibly expensive in both respects. So even if the technology existed, there would be little economic incentive to use it over a water wheels, since transportation is cheaper than fuel and maintenance.

As recently as 1900, steam engines were so expensive that most farmers rented equipment by the day.

Re: How much did a tunic cost in the Roman Empire? (2021)

#118

Post by tagoregrtst »

edmundsauto wrote: post #81
samstave wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

All of human history is the same at its core. Suffering, exploration, profiteering. Yet we have progressed, bit by bit. We have a ways to go, but the arc of history is bending towards less suffering.

“ but the arc of history is bending towards less suffering.”

I don't see it bending towards anything but increasingly vulgar, decadent, forms of violence.

Re: How much did a tunic cost in the Roman Empire? (2021)

#119

Post by jedberg »

Up until very recently, durable goods were very expensive and labor was very cheap. In some parts of the world, that's still the case today.

Just the other day was an article about how Agatha Christie was considered middle class even though she had a live in maid and nanny, because she couldn't afford a car, because the cost of the car was the same as 5 years of salary for both workers.

Re: How much did a tunic cost in the Roman Empire? (2021)

#120

Post by zach_garwood »

qwytw wrote: post #72
wongarsu wrote: post #11

> So a linen weaver would need to work for (500 / 2×40 to 500 / 2×20) 6 to 12 days to earn the price of the simplest linen tunic So translating to modern wages (in US/Western Europe) somewhere between $500 and $1500 for the simplest tunic, or between $7000 and $21000 for the finest quality. That certainly puts the practice of robbers to take people's clothes into perspective.

An average worker in Ancient Rome is not really comparable to a worker in a modern country (e.g he likely would had spent >50% of his income on food, so equivalent wage would probably below the minimum wage in US). The prices in Diocletian's degree don't really make much sense, e.g. for 40 Denarii you could buy ~5 pounds of beef or only 8 pounds of rye/barley. So likely the price for tunics is quite a bit higher than…

The average worker in ancient Rome was a slave.
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