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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)

#121

Post by sandworm101 »

bregma wrote: post #88
Fenrisulfr wrote: post #3

There's a great book about the progression of clothing, textiles, and fabric being scarce and expensive to commonplace and cheap. It runs through the various technological innovations (think cotton gin, but plenty more), culture, and economics. The Fabric of Civilization by Virginia Postrel. Great quote about Viking sail ships: "Viking Age sail 100 meters square took 154 kilometers (60 miles) of yarn. Working eight h…

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…

Plucking is the ancient form of sheering. You literally pull the hair off the sheep by hand. You aren't yanking it out by the roots, the shaft generally broke rather than the root put out of the skin, but I doubt the sheep enjoyed the process. In short: gathering wool from sheep was very different before ready acess to steel shears.

https://www.chassagne.ca/index.php/the-croft-mainmenu-30/the...

"Before the invention of shears, the sheep were plucked or “rooed”, a Scandinavian word for plucking, and this tradition was still carried out on the Shetland Island until about forty years ago."

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

#122

Post by mywittyname »

bluGill wrote: post #35
rsecora wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, and getting the finance to start the journey will be problematic. The elevator pitch for the musket will sound like black magic.

I'm not sure even with an unlimited budget you could get metals that would work as a musket. A cannon could be done if you know how, but the cost of that much metal would mean you would need the unlimited budget.

One could probably build a cannon out of mostly wood, with some banding for strategic reinforcement.

It would be fucking dangerous to operate and might not be all that effective. But my understanding is that the early cannons mainly worked by striking so much fear into people, that they surrendered without resistance.

The machines used to bore cannon holes into logs (lathes) would probably be nearly as profitable as the cannons themselves. And one could presumably use their cannon production business to finance their lathe-building business.

Oh, and there's always dynamite.

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

#123

Post by meristohm »

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.

Less suffering for some of us, at least in the physical toiling sense and in the short term, but with more humans on the planet than ever before, and so many servings to funnel wealth to a minority, I reckon we’re still collectively suffering quite a bit, with more to come as climate change exacerbates weather extremes and aberrations. And then there’s the suffering of non-human animals. What we’re doing doesn’t feel like progress if I value ecological resilience through diversity, deep connection with the environment and my community, and a history unbroken for thousands of years.

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

#124

Post by qwytw »

zach_garwood wrote: post #120
qwytw wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The proportion of slaves in the entire Roman Empire never rose to much more than 15-20% also by 300 AD serfdom had already started to replace slavery in rural areas.

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

#125

Post by retrac »

lumost wrote: post #114
retrac wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For temporary purposes, they usually wrote on wax tablets with styluses, which could be easily melted and re-molded for reuse. They came in little boxes with a protective cover and were used for temporary records and drafts and personal letters: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/11/Table_wi...

And there's always sand! It's probably apocryphal but the legend is that Archimedes was slain by a Roman soldier during the taking of Syracuse when he objected -- "Don't disturb my circles!" -- to how the soldier marched through his trigonometry problems.

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

#126

Post by dfxm12 »

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…

I feel like I see this way more often than before, but I don't have any hard data to back this up. Just like you, I don't have any good answer to that.

Maybe your network is growing or, more realistically, the global pandemic we happen to be in is causing issues than normal. IMO, the answer to this would be voting for politicians who support a welfare system where an accident doesn't bankrupt you (regardless of things like employment status).

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

#127

Post by ghaff »

bluGill wrote: post #35
rsecora wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, and getting the finance to start the journey will be problematic. The elevator pitch for the musket will sound like black magic.

I'm not sure even with an unlimited budget you could get metals that would work as a musket. A cannon could be done if you know how, but the cost of that much metal would mean you would need the unlimited budget.

Black powder bronze firearms did apparently exist historically. Note that bronze is a fairly broad term for a range of alloys, some of which I'm guessing didn't exist in the "bronze age."

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

#128

Post by nabilhat »

jacobolus wrote: post #94
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…

How much faster is a spinning wheel (of typical 500-year-old design, say) vs. a drop spindle, in the hands of someone with 20 years of spinning experience? And can the spinning wheel produce yarn that has similar quality? From skimming around online, it seems that expert spinners get extremely fast with a drop spindle, and can produce higher quality yarn. But I can’t find a definitive answer about the comparative spe…

Drop spindles don't spin continuously, which gives the wheel an uptime advantage.

Even modern spinners who prefer a drop spindle often have a wheel on hand for plying. Spinning a thread out of a blob of fluff can be engaging and interesting, while plying is a tedious process that's hard to get wrong without falling asleep in the middle. There's not really an art or skill to plying. A wheel can knock out this boring part of the spinning process much more quickly.

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

#129

Post by showerst »

jaclaz wrote: post #85
showerst wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a bunch of youtube channels with various takes on "starting from scratch". It seems like a mix of things that are very hard to bootstrap (metal being a big one!), and things that were more coincidental (lathes, saddles and riding gear, spinning looms). Having a modern high school math education would make you the greatest mathematician in history up to about Newton, but more practically speaking I'm thinking…

Not the best example (IMHO): >how concrete and mortar actually work Would you tell Roman engineers how to deal with those? (they actually invented it, and - for certain applications - their concrete is still superior to modern one)

I was thinking in terms of ancient Greece like the GP mentioned. That said, Romans invented and pioneered concrete, but they didn't really understand how or why it worked, it was just centuries of excellent trial and error. They also had problems replicating it out of base materials other than volcanic ash.

Now that said I have my doubts that there are that many people on earth who could build better concrete for a given application than the Romans with no store to go buy pure materials from, I'm certainly not one of them.

That's also why I didn't talk about modern steel -- In my head I vaguely understand that there's a chain from copper to wire to a rotor/stator to electrolysis to oxygen gas to the Bessemer process, but I'd be amazed if there's anyone on earth who could bootstrap it in one lifetime, even with an ancient king's resources.

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

#130

Post by [deleted] »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #27
Fenrisulfr wrote: post #3

There's a great book about the progression of clothing, textiles, and fabric being scarce and expensive to commonplace and cheap. It runs through the various technological innovations (think cotton gin, but plenty more), culture, and economics. The Fabric of Civilization by Virginia Postrel. Great quote about Viking sail ships: "Viking Age sail 100 meters square took 154 kilometers (60 miles) of yarn. Working eight h…

> 100 meters square I think that might take a bit more than 154 km of yarn. Presumably you meant 100 square metre. :-)

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