Arrested… by whom?
Tenochtitlan, capital of the Aztec Empire (which wasn’t really an empire), was very large but very clean: Tenochtitlan - Wikipedia
I recommend this book for anyone interested in finding out more about daily life for a Roman soldier; it’s written as if it’s a manual for a new recruit: http://www.amazon.com/Legionary-Soldiers-Unofficial-Manual-Manuals/dp/0500251517/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1317735517&sr=1-1
The second sounds a lot like what movies make American courts look like…
Priobably even then. The great Chinese cities, for example, were large but none too clean; they never had quite the hydroengineering genius of the Romans, nor the will to use it for public works in any case, barring some huge projects which worked for the benefit of the rulers.
I wonder if the products produced during the American Civil War by the Shoddy Company were any good?
Great thead by the way.
Yup and (with a few exceptions) treatment of infections had not really improved any during the intervening 2000 years. Augustus’ doctors were no less likely to cure him (the fact many of them were credited with doing so is probably down to dumb luck on his/their part, as he happened to get better after they administered some treatment or other).
Isn’t it the case that, over time in crowded urban environments, natural selection kicks in and people develop better immunities to the kinds of bugs that go around?
I’m afraid I don’t have enough information to compare the living condition of Tenochtitlan to Rome, but Tenochtitlan doesn’t seem to have the public Baths available in Rome. Also note the free grain available in Rome and free entertainment.
Gladiatorial combat versus human sacrifice is pretty close to a push. There also didn’t seem to be a class of free citizens in Tenochtitlan and not much in term of civil rights. I think I would take 18th century London, even their streets were covered in shit.
As I recall from my reading, the ancient Japanese did better, since they considered human waste valuable fertilizer and carefully collected and recycled it. The people of Rome weren’t as fastidious about emptying their chamber pots from the upper floors of their insulae.
It’s not like Rome was particularly clean. From what we know about it, the city was dirty, crowded, noisy, violent, unsanitary, pestilential, subject to regular floods from the Tiber, and prone to fire.
An interesting quirk was that while the cities the Romans founding in their provinces were famously well ordered and laid out with careful planning, their mother city was the exact opposite. Rome herself was a chaotic, unsanitary (and unsafe) maze.
It was very unlikely to have been a quirk.
Baghdad. Cairo. Agra. Delhi. Cordaba. Constantinople during the reign of Basil II.
Sorry, Cordaba? I can’t place that one. If it’s Cordoba, it’s in Europe and pre-roman (there’s ruins of roman and pre-roman construction under the Mezquita Catedral).
From what I’ve read, both private and public baths were common in Tenochtitlan. No free grain, but no one starved. There was free entertainment - museums, plays, concerts, athletic games, etc. There were free citizens in the Aztec Empire, but slavery too. Ritual human sacrifice was common, although wars in that culture were smaller-scale and much less lethal than in Europe. Civil rights were just as limited as in any other pre-Enlightenment theocracy; certainly you’d be freer in Georgian London.
I’m not saying I’d want to live in Aztec times, but I do think the culture compares favorably to Rome on a number of points.
You planned on dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease first? What an odd ambition…
Pompei - the north part is a mish-mash of old streets, but like modern cities and their suburbs, the expansion south is neat blocks, with neatly planned roman water and sewer systems.
The gods are more fun to carve into stone, for one thing.
You really want to contend that Baghdad and Cairo were superior to 2nd Century AD Rome? Arab civil engineering was inferior to roman engineering and they didn’t even have the concept of rule of law. I recall someone referred Arab political systems as despotism tempered by inefficiency.
I’m not familiar with Indian history, I’ll have to work up a rebuttal.
You had already had excluded Constantinople.
In any case Constantinople was a far smaller city than 2nd century Rome.
In the 8th century the ancient Chinese capital of Chang’an was as big as Rome at its height, and the population apparently enjoyed quite a bit in the way of public works and entertainment. I’m not sure about baths, but sanitation was handled by a series of canals, there was a great emphasis on law and order and bureaucracy, and I imagine medicine was at least on the level of the Romans and Greeks.
They didn’t, and they frequently died when they got sick. It was only around the turn of the 20th century that combat killed more soldiers in war than disease did. For example, there’s a breakdown on casualties in all US wars on wiki, if you look at the columns under death it’s broken down into ‘combat’ and ‘other.’ Most of the ‘other’ is death by disease, and it is consistently higher than combat deaths, often by a very large margin, until it becomes close to even in WW1. The conditions that soldiers throughout history have lived in while on campaign invited dysentery, cholera, typhoid, pneumonia, and tuberculosis among other diseases, and was often also accompanied by poor nutrition in the field. The causes of these diseases were not fully understood, and treatment was essentially non-existent.