How much did a tunic cost in the Roman Empire? (2021) • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by ghaff » Thu, Jan 27, 2022, 4:47 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #53

robbomacrae wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not build a printing press? All you really need to do is carve some wood. As expensive as tunics were, books were much more so. Copying the bible would have taken several months (if not years) of labour. And the ability and control to spread such knowledge faster than others would not only be very lucrative but a source of great power.

>Why not build a printing press? All you really need to do is carve some wood The printing press seems to be far more complex than just "carve some wood". Otherwise I find it hard to believe that it took until 1400AD for people to figure out how to make large stamps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press#Gutenberg's_pre...

There is a lot of basic scientific knowledge that many/most modern people have (germ theory of disease, how the body works at some level, astronomy 101, etc.) But ancient people weren't stupid. They just didn't have advanced technology. Recreating a whole chain of technology to bring about the iron age maybe 1000 years early probably isn't happening. The fact is that they're mostly doing pretty well with building things that the technology more or less exists for.

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

#62

Post by dsr_ » Thu, Jan 27, 2022, 4:47 PM UTC

missedthecue wrote: post #49

emaginniss wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The phrase is usually "he'd give you the shirt off his back." That's much nicer

and it really has nothing to do with the price of clothing

It does, at least a little.

If you give someone a $20 shirt, causing yourself a little embarassment, that's not quite the same commitment to charity as giving them your $20,000 car.

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

#63

Post by xyzzyz » Thu, Jan 27, 2022, 4:47 PM UTC

KineticLensman wrote: post #57

bluGill wrote: post #32

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. Sure you could. The antikythera mechanism shows more than enough skill and precision to make a small one. It might only be a toy for the rich though. I'm not sure if you could afford enough metal to make one large enough to do useful work, and even if you could the fuel…

> 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.

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

#64

Post by aledalgrande » Thu, Jan 27, 2022, 4:47 PM UTC

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…

Related to this if you like the topic and anime, watch Dr. Stone.

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

#65

Post by devenson » Thu, Jan 27, 2022, 4:48 PM UTC

mynameishere wrote: post #37

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.

Modern business suit prices in other words or thereabouts.

The cost is a feature, not a bug. It must be pricey to signal status.

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

#66

Post by estaseuropano » Thu, Jan 27, 2022, 4:49 PM UTC

robbomacrae wrote: post #38

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…

Why not build a printing press? All you really need to do is carve some wood. As expensive as tunics were, books were much more so. Copying the bible would have taken several months (if not years) of labour. And the ability and control to spread such knowledge faster than others would not only be very lucrative but a source of great power.

The printing press is the easy part - parchment was expensive and hard or impossible to get.

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

#67

Post by xyzzyz » Thu, Jan 27, 2022, 4:52 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #29

chopin wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am pretty sure you could build a musket from bronze. Afaik the early cannons where made of it. Sourcing of the ingredients for black powder might have been harder.

Cannons were cast however and musket barrels aren't. It's unclear you could make the barrels thick/strong enough to be useful. (At some point, you end up with something probably less useful than a refined bow design.) In general, with these scenarios, another variable is do you just wake up in another time or do you have time to prepare, maybe have reference books/artifacts, figure out what you can do given technolog…

Yes, you very much could build an effective firearm using bronze or brass. Brass barrels were quite commonly used historically. They are less suitable for modern, high pressure propellants, but for black powder firearms, they’ll work just fine.

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

#68

Post by Telemakhos » Thu, Jan 27, 2022, 4:52 PM UTC

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…

> I can multiply numbers, of arbitrary size. And I can do it in a few seconds using just a stylus and tablet.

So could a Roman or Greek. He'd just need a counting board and some stones. He could probably do it faster than you, as well. Anyone using an abacus today could perform almost exactly the same algorithms, with the added convenience of having beads on rods in a frame instead of an unwieldy counting board and stones. The algorithms are the same, and you can also do division and square roots with a counting board or abacus. When done deftly moving stones around on the counting board (and Aristotle makes clear that this goes so quickly that it's possible for the person calculating to cheat an onlooker, like in a con-man's shell game), one might choose to write the result down on a tablet, and he might just finish writing before you do.

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

#69

Post by thrown_22 » Thu, Jan 27, 2022, 4:54 PM UTC

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…

>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.

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

#70

Post by ajuc » Thu, Jan 27, 2022, 4:54 PM UTC

xyzzyz wrote: post #59

samstave wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The poor would typically make their own clothes. This was of course very labor intensive, but back in the day, benefits from division of labor weren’t that huge, and the poor often did not have better employment opportunities (that’s why they were poor in the first place).

90%+ worked in farming, and in farming depending on the climate over the year you had months with nothing to do vs months with 16 hours of work a day. The whole system was designed around making sure few people starved and work was distributed around somewhat sensibly with such wild seasonal swings of labour shortage and surplus.

So yeah, DIY all the way.