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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)

#171

Post by vkou »

samstave wrote: post #46
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.

What were the poor people wearing? How did women earn these - were linen garments a form of payment to effective prostitution? YES: Source; Kimono.

> What were the poor people wearing?

Dollar analysis like 'how much did X cost in a pre-industrial economy' is incredibly unsuitable for answering these kinds of questions.

The answer is - most people weren't wage workers. Most people didn't have money. Most people were subsistence peasants, and they paid taxes, rent, and for many services in goods. What money they had would usually go towards buying things they couldn't make.

Most people wore homespun. Clothing a typical Roman peasant family[1] would take ~3,000 hours of domestic labour a year - every year, most of it devoted to spinning flax. Being domestic labour, done by the family, for the family, most of it, was, of course, unpaid. Being the kind of labour that you can do on-and-off throughout the day, as you are waiting on other tasks, it was mostly done by women. [2]

[1] https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-did-t...

[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/distaff

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

#172

Post by kragen »

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…

Would you? Maybe it depends on how hard you have to struggle merely to survive and how much freedom you have. If you were a helot in ancient Sparta you'd have to be careful not to draw the attention of the Spartiates; they'd kill you for sport if they thought you were too virtuous.

What is this about drilling into granite? The Egyptians were drilling into granite a thousand years earlier using copper tube drills and quartz sand, which they probably could have drilled a lot faster if they'd known about emery, but I don't understand where granite drilling fits into the steel supply chain.

But with freedom and some way to survive you can get pretty far. In only four and a half years, apparently without using modern materials other than a video camera and writing instruments, John Plant was able to bootstrap from sticks and stones up to celt axes, coarse pants (spun of course with a drop spindle), a centrifugal blower, iron smelting powered by it, fired bricks, several huts, ceramic tile roofs, underfloor heating, cob construction, bow and arrow, atlatl, lime cement, wood ash cement, crawfish traps, rock-heated soup pots, charcoal burning, a pump drill, and a monjolo.

He hasn't yet been able to smelt enough iron to make so much as a fishhook, though, and Australian law doesn't allow him to hunt animals for sinew, leather, catgut, bone, and bladder.

A thing he's missing so far is metrology, which is very important for chemistry and for muskets and other machines. He also doesn't have much in the way of chemical resources on his land: no saltpeter and no concentrated salt, though he could perhaps purify them from urine.

Still, imagine how far he could get in 40 years with all the knowledge from the present and without those restrictions. It's an amazing contrast to what most of us have achieved in modern life with much more resources.

https://primitivetechnology.wordpress.com/

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

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

#173

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #163
sandworm101 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> $500 and $1500 for the simplest tunic, or between $7000 and $21000 for the finest quality. Go look at the price for a nice suit, or a designer dress. Those numbers are not terribly high.

"Not terribly high," I mean 99.5% of Americans will never spend even the lower end of that range on a single garment. It seems pretty high to me. Also you have to get pretty high up into the luxury market before you'll find a suit that costs $7,000. Armanis are synonymous with luxury suits in the public consciousness and they top out at $4,000, according to their website. The cost of those luxury items don't come fro…

> The cost of those luxury items don't come from the cost of making them.

That's not entirely true, especially when it comes to haute couture. For example, clothes made by a French fashion house may take tens/hundreds of hours to make, at Western European salaries. Yes, agreed, the markup puts the cost into the stratosphere, but the point is that clothes made like this would need to cost thousands of dollars at minimum just to cover the labor (instead of the tens of thousands they sell for).

I interpreted the parent's comment of "not terribly high" as meaning not terribly high when compared to modern day clothes that take a similar amount of labor. When you think about it, the amount of manual labor that would need to go into a tunic (shearing wool or picking cotton, washing and spinning the fibers, weaving the cloth, sewing and cutting the garment) is enormous without modern day machines. The reason stuff like fast fashion today is so cheap is not just that it's put together in poor countries (though that's obviously part of it), but that the total amount of labor that goes into something like a shirt or dress is in the the ~10-15 minute range, not the 30-40 hour range.

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

#174

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

dharmab wrote: post #170
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Not terribly high," I mean 99.5% of Americans will never spend even the lower end of that range on a single garment. It seems pretty high to me. Also you have to get pretty high up into the luxury market before you'll find a suit that costs $7,000. Armanis are synonymous with luxury suits in the public consciousness and they top out at $4,000, according to their website. The cost of those luxury items don't come fro…

> I mean 99.5% of Americans will never spend even the lower end of that range on a single garment. Wedding dresses?

Normal people don't buy $7,000 wedding dresses. Hell, even a lot of rich people don't.

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

#175

Post by jrockway »

nabilhat wrote: post #105
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.

> That certainly puts the practice of robbers to take people's clothes into perspective. Cloth was so valuable that the words for both the robber and the extremely valuable robes they stole and plundered share a common origin: https://www.etymonline.com/word/robe#etymonline_v_15128

This makes me want to set up a tailoring business on the side of the road and call it "Highway Robery"

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

#176

Post by bsder »

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…

> That includes things like clothing, but it also includes more staggering ideas like hand-spinning all the fabric for sails for ships, which is a seriously nontrivial amount of time!

The problem is that there is push and pull.

The Cotton Gin is quite famous about this. Anyone could have invented the cotton gin--and lots probably did. The problem is that nobody needed an order of magnitude more cotton--until they did. And once they did need more cotton--hey, presto--the cotton gin becomes widespread.

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

#177

Post by thrown_22 »

tynpeddler wrote: post #104
thrown_22 wrote: post #69

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. The Greeks had steam engines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile It's just that slaves were vastly cheaper. In Britain early steam engines were price competitive with horses only at the coal mine for the first century of their operation.

An aeolipile is massively inefficient and it would have been almost impossible for ancient societies to extract useful work from it. By constantly releasing steam, an enormous amount of energy and matter is released from the engine that could otherwise be recycled. It's like trying to power a car with a rocket engine. The first steam engines that were used for practical work were low powered and very unreliable, but…

>An aeolipile is massively inefficient and it would have been almost impossible for ancient societies to extract useful work from it. By constantly releasing steam, an enormous amount of energy and matter is released from the engine that could otherwise be recycled. It's like trying to power a car with a rocket engine. The first steam engines that were used for practical work were low powered and very unreliable, but they did close the the steam cycle which allowed them to exploit the liquid -> gas phase transition while keeping (some or) the hot water around to reheat.

The first engines were atmospheric pressure, e.g. they used a vacuum to work. They were not closed cycle and they did not care about wasting water seeing as their purpose was to be a water pump. They didn't care about wasting coal as they worked at a coal mine. For the first century of their development they were stuck in the one niche where both the things they required were free.

https://etc.usf.edu/clipart/77500/77524/77524_newcm_stmeng.h...

An illustration that shows how they removed waste water from the piston. It was a century before high pressure engines were used, which were also open cycle and why steam trains released great plumes of steam when they moved.

The Aeolipile is exceedingly easy to reduce the steam outflow by having smaller nozzles. Given that they are basically a solid sphere made with four pipes sticking out they would have been the easiest form of high pressure engine to keep from exploding if there was a demand for mechanical work. They would however still explode, unlike the atmospheric engines.

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

#178

Post by V99 »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #174
dharmab wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean 99.5% of Americans will never spend even the lower end of that range on a single garment. Wedding dresses?

Normal people don't buy $7,000 wedding dresses. Hell, even a lot of rich people don't.

The 'lower end of that range' is $500, and you'll definitely spend that if you're buying a wedding dress.

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

#179

Post by bagacrap »

missedthecue wrote: post #50
rahimiali wrote: post #48

This sentence stood out to me most: “executioners often claimed the clothes that their clients wore to the execution”. The word “client” is what shook me.

seems they'd be a little bloody after the fact

if I got blood on a $2k shirt, I'd probably bother to clean it
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