Do you actually have a cite showing that other people could supply city the size of Rome with water all over the city using nothing but the natural water flow and not muscle power to elevate the water.
Here is a reference showing how the Roman water system worked starting on page 199.
I don’t know if you noticed, but other cities the size of Rome managed to exist and be supplied with water, which suggests that whatever hydrological techniques they used worked.
This point is addressed in the book I mentioned on page 201. The Romans had much more water per person. You can live on 1 gallon of water a day, but the Romans may have used from 80 to 300 gallons per day per person. Most cities got by on the water they could get from their rivers and canals.
Rome may have also been the first city with over one million people and the logistics of providing food itself was enormous. Baghdad had a comparable population, but is isn’t clear to me that their standard of living was comparable.
I’ve worked in the legal field in America. I’ve seen and been involved in dozens of trials. I’m also a big film buff, and I’ve seen dozens of trials in movies. I have never seen a film that realistically portrayed the way trials work in the United States. I’ve never even seen one that has come close. The procedure is usually wrong. The way the law works in general is usually wrong. The way lawyers are portrayed as behaving in court is almost always very far from reality.
I understand that this is true of many subjects covered by movies and television. While I’m talking about television, Rome the HBO series is a great show, and I agree with the sentiment that it conveyed the spirit and feel of Ancient Rome (or at least what we think the spirit and feel would be, based on what we know), but it still had a lot of inaccuracies, and it never really did the complex Roman court systems justice.
So, aside from the aquaducts…
Why not? You know the standard of living in ancient Rome was pretty crappy, right? In the city itself? You had massive overcrowding, near starvation, high levels of disease and crime. You’re not really talking about a very high standard of living.
Not true. I wouldn’t even get in on this, but it’s nonsense. Aside from cheap baths, free food much of the time, and much lower problems with disease and crime than a city of that scale had any right to, Rome was considered a huge magnet city across the Empire. The worst problems were cheap wooden housing in and narrow streets, a problem not readily solvable in any case.
This is not true, either. There is currently raging debate in Roman historiography about both population count and standard of living at Rome during the Republic and the Empire. Demography and individual welfare have been very hot topics in Roman history for the past few years.
Historians and demographers generally fall into high count and low count camps, and very good arguments are made on both sides. This is a paper by a leading demographer (whose grad seminar I had the pleasure of taking a few years ago) that summarizes the debate. The analysis of living standards starts on page 20.
The specific question of mortality in ancient Rome is still one that’s pretty heavily debated. But I think you’re making a more optimistic assessment than is warranted. We know that the Tiber flooded every several years. We know that malaria and cholera were endemic to Rome, and we know that each summer month, thousands of people would die of disease.
Read Scobie’s “Slums, Sanitation, and Mortality in the Roman World”
Just to point out* that research has shown thatRoman concrete had a special component named pozzolona, nearby vulcanic ash, that allowed Roman concrete special properties that no other cities elsewhere could duplicate.
This is not an argument for superior skill, but instead luck of the draw. A similar argument applies to damascene steel: only recent research with expensive machines found that the steel had special isotopes = impurities from local ore. The same method used in other places resulted in steel not as good, not because people lacked skill, but because they lacked a specific ingredient that was not detectable with the naked eye.
*the idiocy of the argument that the Romans were better engineers only because they had concrete isn’t really worth adressing
I didn’t say that was the only reason, but it did make it possible for them to build things that other civilizations found difficult to duplicate. Their civil engineering skill was shown by the dozens of different ways they found to use their concrete. The unreinforced concrete dome of the Pantheon is an amazing achievement.
Compared to what? Up until a couple of hundred years ago the whole human race lived in what we would consider grinding poverty. Do you actually have a ancient city of comparable population that didn’t have these problems? If anything the conditions in Rome were better because of the grain dole and public sanitation. At least Rome had the logistics to bring food from Egypt and Sicily and they weren’t drinking out of the Tiber and had ways of disposing of their waste.
I’m not sure how seriously I would take arguments that reject “solid archaeological support for elevated levels of physiological well-being in this period” because it is inconsistent with their theories.
You’ve misread this argument pretty thoroughly.
I referring to the theory that Italy couldn’t have a high standard of living because that would be inconsistent with high population. Since the paper was a survey of various positions, what argument do you think I was referring to?
If they were in barracks, they went to the infirmary. We know that from duty rosters that have been recovered. By the standards of today, a Roman garrison was a cesspit of disease. You might have 10-15% of the men down with something at any given time, where that something is cholera or typhoid or something else that’s shitting-blood horrific. But by the same token, these men are fighting against men that have even worse internal hygiene and nutrition, so: winning. A Roman army camp, for instance, sometimes had fullblown dirt-dredged sewage systems. Latrine cleaning actually got assigned as punishment duties. They did know, and care, about disease in the field. Other armies basically squatted in their own filth until they fought, fled or fell over from disease.
As for “healthy”, that’s still debated quite a bit. One theory has it that mortality was so high that anyone who didn’t have a naturally sturdy constitution either died in infancy or shortly thereafter. So everyone left was immune to alot of things, or at least not going to be killed by it, and was little bit higher on a standard deviation scale as far as recovering from injuries. The other theory is that the foregoing is BS, and that everyone was basically walking wounded from childhood, accumulating injuries and pockmarks until they finally fell over.
Define successfully. The answer is yes though death from shock, infection or blood loss was common. Actually they were decent enough surgeons. But surgeons and doctors weren’t the same. Doctors struggled with disease and illness, while surgeons dealt mostly with physical injury such as lacerations, bone breaks, etc. Doctors were typically slaves or freedmen working for coin. Surgeons could be found in the legions or plying their trade thereafter. The nature of Roman social structure pretty much meant that all good surgeons were former military, and thus citizens. Doctors were typically Greeks who started their careers as non-citizens or slaves. Though there of course are exceptions, as it was a big time period and a big empire. TLDR if you cut yourself or broke an arm, surgeon. Have the sniffles or dysentery, doctor. Surgeons were more reliable than doctors, not least of all because they had probably learned their trade by practicing it on thousands of well-armed legionaries.
They did. There was no survival chance for the mother. C-sections would only happen if the mother was going to die anyway. Otherwise they’d kill the child and extract the remains. This is a society that freely adopted children, and also continued to expose its unwanted infants in the Forum (imagine tossing your unwanted baby on the steps of Parliament) well into the late Republic. A live wife was valued more than a live baby, and plus she had something to say in the matter.
Absolutely.
I mean, if you survived childhood in Roman times, you had to have a good immune system. Plus a legionaire’s diet was pretty healthy (grains, greens, and a little meat-no cholesterol, sugar, or trans fats). So, if you survived the rigor’s of a soldier’s life-you had to be pretty tough. The army term of service was 25 years-assuming you joined as a youth of 16, you would be 41 at retirement-cold you anticipate living another 20 years?
No cholesterol or sugar? Yeah… let’s not get into that. Suffice it to say you have a very idealized picture of their diet. They ate whatever was at hand; sometimes nothing and sometuimes piles of meat if circumstances dictated. Aside from which, cholesterol and transfats wouldn’t have killing legionaires even if they knew what those were. Fat legionaires were a rarity even in the least military days of the empire.
That said, living to 60 or so washardly unusual. In fact, the biggest threat even then was pnuemonia. If your lungs were healthy, you could definitely get over 60. of course, that was always the trick. If you did get a lung sickness, there was little to do except wait and pray.
Sugar was very rare for most of ancient history; in fact, they only used honey. It took years of specific breeding to get the sugar beetto make enough sugar worthwhile. That’s why cane sugar is one of the five plants that changed history.
And high cholerstol is from eating a lot of fat plus a sedentary lifestyle. Roman legionnaires didn’t sit around, they fought or practiced.
Gladiators were encouraged to eat a high-carbohydrate diet despite their strenuous exercise, because extra layers of fat protected them during battle.
You make it sound as if they scrounged the countryside for what to eat. Rather, it was regulated how much food a soldier received per day, and for sake of cheapness and ease of transport, that would be beans or similar to make stew with, and wheat flour to make bread. If some meat was found, it would go into the stew, but there was no large supply of meat, because it’s much easier and cheaper to feed people grain than to feed cows on grain and slaughter them.
The wealthy who ate a lot and refined foods and didn’t move much could get fat, and it’s mentioned about certain individuals that they were fit in their youth while serving in the army, but later as senators grew fat.
Still, Roman virtue was living spartan like a soldier, so gorging on exquisite food was seen as decadent.
Why single out pneumonia? There are any number of diseases you can die of in old age, esp. with not-modern medicine.
I know what you were referring to; the problem is that you didn’t understand it. There are two issues: high count and high standards of living are historically quite aberrant and that archaeological evidence is insufficient to conclude that welfare was all that high. The first issue isn’t fatal, but since the claim is out of pattern with what we know about ancient societies, it would require very good evidence to substantiate. The problem is that we just don’t have very good evidence.