And how do you explain the practice dummy with “Skald the Rhymer” stencilled on its forehead, the seventeen separate locationson said practice dummy marked, in indelible ink, “Bite here,” and the manual on teaching simultaneous biting techniques to cobras?
BEDEVERE
And that, my lord, is how we know the Earth to be banana-shaped.
KING ARTHUR
This new learning amazes me, Sir Bedevere. Explain to me again how sheep’s bladders may be employed to prevent earthquakes.
BEDEVERE
Of course, my liege…
I use it in typing practice. And as a doorstop. And for trading, with the Nomads of the Desert.
I stand corrected.
So do you! 
In global terms, average American middle-class persons are not regular people. If the world were a village . . .
Must have been quite a few. Many Roman colonies were settled by veterans. (BTW, Roman soldiers are generally referred to as “legionaries.” Legionnaires are something different.)
A practically all-meat diet doesn’t seem to have hurt the Eskimos.
Not at all.
Are you trying to say that the imperial family was a rough bunch and liable to kill each other? Then yes, I agree. When Julius Caesar was making his babies Rome had been in an on again off again civil war for decades and the power structure was crumbling around everybody’s ears. Caesar had three children; one died with his mother Cornelia, one died in childbirth and one was killed by his adopted step-brother in part of a power grab to become supreme high leader. I can’t help but think that’s an anomaly. Unless, again, you mean that it’s tough to live to retirement if you come from the ruling family of a military nation in the midst of civil war. I’ll grant you that: Romans could be hard-core bicki dicki when it came to little things like, I don’t know, control of Egypt. I would not find it surprising, had he not been killed, for Julius Caesar to have lived into his 70’s. (His mother died at 66.)
I mean, if we look at JFK we can conclude that it’s rough to be the son of a President because your “life expectancy” is only 18. I don’t think that’s what life expectancy means. Unless you want to say that it sucked for the Kennedy boys because, if we give Ted Kennedy 10 more years their life expectancy was somewhere around 50, which is way worse than most of the developed world.
Now we skip ahead to Agrippa’s kids, none of whom, I would argue (except possibly Postumus) could be considered possible heirs to Augustus from birth because the obvious heir apparent was Agrippa. Regardless, the first two sons died in Gaul. I want to say that Gaius died as a result of wounds sustained in a previous campaign, but I can’t find anything that says that definitively. I’m not sure what happened to Lucius.
Postumus was killed almost immediately upon Augustus’s death because he was wildly unstable. There were contemporary rumors that this was actually ordered by Augustus himself.
Julia the younger died in her late forties, having lived most of her life in exile and having been pregnant 9 times. Agrippina also died in exile, but not before losing an eye during a fight with a legionary and trying to starve herself to death.
What’s my point? Oh, yeah, Cletus and Verma-Ellen might be able to say to their kids “Boy, if you eat your veggies you’ll grow up big and strong like your pappy and live to be 85,” but if they then turn around and start killing them to prevent unfortunate inheritances and shipping them off to islands well… I don’t think they’re going to make it. (Especially the killing part.)
What I think is more interesting is how long the Roman aristocracy tended to live when they weren’t actively shortening their lifespans with crises of succession. Even just looking at the imperial line (where people tended to get the knife in the back after jerking people around for a couple of years):
Julius Caesar 56 (He’s a proto-emperor, maybe he only counts half?)
Augustus 76
Tiberius 79
Caligula 28 (Um… yeah.)
Claudius 64 (Don’t piss off Agrippina)
Nero 31 (Should have been a singer.)
Bit of a scuffle for the ball here and…
Vespasian 70
Titus 42 (It’s tough to be Domitian’s older brother)
Domitian 45 (“I wonder how long I can piss away the treasury and kill people for. Oh, 15 years? Sounds good to me.” Stab stab stab.)
Nerva 68 (“I have a clever plan: I shall choose competent people to be my heirs instead of letting genetics/praetorians decide.”)
Trajan 64
Hadrian 62 (“Does this beard make me look Greek?”)
Antoninus Pius 75
Marcus Aurelius 59 (“I have a better idea: meet my son, Commodus…”)
et cetera.
If we look at this list of ages: 56, 76, 79, 28, 64, 31, 70, 42, 45, 68, 64, 62, 75, 59, it looks more or less the same as those French kings from earlier. The ones who died young were unnatural deaths, as did several of the elder ones.
This is all a bit of a sidetrack, though. We both agree that Caesar’s kids didn’t live very long, nor did Agrippa’s. In general, though, the patrician class could be counted on to stick around for a while. I’ll keep an eye out for anything that indicates how long the slightly more common than augusti but still sitting on a massive pile of silver set lived.
sinjin
And here’s the rest of that post I chopped up, as I reference some of it up-post.
advantage modern women
Lobelia, did you intentionally turn on your signature for that post? 
I find your lack of veracity disturbing.
I’ll vote for today in general. In fact there’s a book that pretty much claims that the average poor American today has a better life than John Rockefeller had.
Some examples:
Entertainment - Can’t sleep and want to see sports, drama, rap music, drama.
Advantage: Today
Travel - Even poor people can occasionally fly anywhere they want.
Advantage: Today
Life expectancy - This is a no-brainer
Advantage: Today
All of which misses the point.
The existence of a position such as the Groom of the Stool (or Stole) isn’t evidence of a lack of privacy, but rather that they were more than familiar with the concept and, what is more, valued it. The Groom’s job was to prevent anyone else getting access to the King when he was on the closestool. That is why, in the case of the English court, this particular position became, over time, one of the major court offices, with the power to control who got to see the King not just when he was taking a dump but at all times. He was there to ensure that as few people as possible ever got to meet the King.
There is a more general point. Historians of early-modern European courts now see the desire for privacy as one of the central features of ‘Burgundian’ (or, perhaps more accurately, Imperial/Spanish/English)-style courts of that period. The rise of the English Groom of the Stool was only the most obvious consequence of that process. It was also reflected in increased ritualisation of court life (ritual, by controlling access, increased privacy, not reduced it), in the way royal households were organised, in the layout of royal palaces and in political decision-making (again, all a matter of access). Although there was never to be any let-up in the hordes trying to get access, most monarchs from the fifteenth century onwards were successful in isolating themselves in increasingly private apartments, waited on by select groups of trusted companions of their own choosing. In other words, daily life for them became self-consciously private. Only the French court was different and that is why older - or more popular - historians get this so completely wrong. The Starkey interpretation - for, yes, it was David Starkey who has been the most influential proponent of this view, which indeed remains his major contribution to serious, academic history - is now regarded by most historians as being as valid for most other European courts as it was, when first formulated a generation ago, for the Tudor court.
Cite? :dubious:
The classic exposition of that specific point is Starkey’s PhD thesis - ‘The King’s Privy Chamber 1485-1547’, Cambridge University, 1974 - which famously remains unpublished. The standard treatment in print is therefore the collection of essays by various historians edited by him as The English Court: from the War of the Roses to the Civil War (Longman, London, 1987).
The literature applying that same model to other European courts is now vast. The obvious summaries in English would be the collection of essays edited by John Adamson, The Princely Courts of Europe, 1500-1750 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1999), as well as Jeroen Duindam, Vienna and Versailles: the courts of Europe’s dynastic rivals, 1550-1780 (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
The point really is now completely uncontroversial among academic historians.
I have access to toilet paper (soft toilet paper, not corncobs or anything like that), chocolate, and air conditioning. I win.
I really don’t buy this at all. Life expentancy is nice but I am not sure it beats wealth, power and social status.
You mean like parents of small kids?
My husband and I talked about this not long ago, we not only live a much better life than kings of the past, we live a life that half the population of earth right now can only dream of. That’s not small thing, and we take it for granted.
And to those of you that say that because rulers didn’t know anything else they did not wish for privacy are missing a point: just because you haven’t experienced something doesn’t mean that you cannot want it (see: men, threesome 
). I cannot believe that at least some of those kings and queens were not the shy, private type, who have wished for, what Queen Victoria called, “some fucking peace and quiet”*. They just couldn’t have it, just as I can’t be tele-transported to Europe instead of having to fly 10 hrs to get there.
*She didn’t say that, but she would if she had lived in modern times.
Great. Now I’m going to hear Dame Judy saying “We are not fucking amused!” all night…