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lobotomy molo
May 7, 2007

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

Grand Fromage posted:

I've never seen one or even a picture so I have no idea.

I feel like I say no idea a lot in this thread. :v: Sorry about that, but Rome is such a broad topic there's just no way for any one person to know all this stuff. I warned you!

That's crazy talk, nobody knows everything but you've explained a very wide range of topics throughout this thread. I've been reading it since page 1, and your "idunno"s have been far outnumbered by your "why, yes, I know all about that obscure topic"s.

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Parity Bit
Apr 1, 2010
While we're on the subject of construction, could you talk about how the Romans used wood? Did the Romans really live in cities of stone like in movies or did that just end up in the popular culture because the stone's all that survived? Do we know if their wooden architecture was different from their stone architecture in any interesting ways?

Thanks for the interesting thread. It's inspired me to buy two books already, it's like marketing for historians.

Grand Fromage
Jan 30, 2006

L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?


All the real Roman cities were primarily stone, but they used both and mixed them too. The most common building would've been the insulae, the apartment blocks, and those were stone with wood being used inside. The floors were wood beams, like floors in houses today. I believe there was also more wood used the higher the building was for weight considerations. Minimal wood construction inside cities helped with fires too.

Wood construction would've been more common in small provincial towns. Generally the Romans would transition from wood to stone. For example, the first arenas in Rome were all wooden construction. Imagine the loving Colosseum made out of wood--it was a hell of a building project. What actually triggered the first stone arenas was that these wooden ones collapsed several times and killed hundreds, maybe thousands of people, so they needed something better. Once you get to Rome's height it's primarily stone.

You find wood everywhere though. Like the floor of the arena, that was wood. In the understructure it's divided up and there were originally two floors, that all was wood and now the remaining stone just makes it look like a big chamber. In Herculaneum there is actually some original Roman wood left, it was turned into charcoal and you can see it sticking out on the second story, where it would've been the floor beams for the upper level of the building.

We don't know much detail about the wooden architecture since it just doesn't survive. As a side thing, this is why architectural history is very different in East Asia. Wood was the primary building material, and structures would be regularly replaced and rebuilt as the wood went to poo poo. There's very little monumental stone architecture since they just didn't do it, for whatever reason. And most of the "ancient" buildings are actually later reconstructions. Asian cultures (I'm talking about the Chinese cultural sphere here, so China/Korea/Japan primarily) never developed an appreciation of architecture as history, unlike the west, which I think still continues in the culture to this day as evidenced by the love of leveling old buildings and throwing up new ones without any concern for preserving the architecture like we would in the west. Instead, they valued art and especially writing in a much more central way than we do in the west.

Nenonen
Oct 22, 2009

Mulla on aina kolkyt donaa taskussa

Grand Prize Winner posted:

The whatnow? I googled 'lauteet' and all I got was pictures of saunas and a bunch of Finnish.

Mr. Ras Het was referring to a Finnish urban legend about someone with too much money and too little common sense ordering the construction of a sauna with the benches (lauteet) made of metal rather than wood. :supaburn:

Ultras Lazio
May 22, 2010

by Y Kant Ozma Post

Grand Fromage posted:

I've never seen one or even a picture so I have no idea.

I feel like I say no idea a lot in this thread. :v: Sorry about that, but Rome is such a broad topic there's just no way for any one person to know all this stuff. I warned you!

I've read every-single-page and I am not sure you appreciate how grateful and happy people are of what you did here.

I am a Roman and I say thank you, thank you and thank you.

meatbag
Apr 2, 2007
Clapping Larry
Why did Rome produce so little iron?

NightConqueror
Oct 5, 2006
im in ur base killin ur mans
How has Gibbons' Decline and Fall held up over the years? In the 250-odd years since it was written, has anything come to light that has challenged any of his major premises? Do Roman historians look favorably on him?

NightConqueror fucked around with this message at 18:25 on Jul 8, 2012

physeter
Jan 24, 2006

high five, more dead than alive

NightConqueror posted:

How has Gibbons' Decline and Fall held up over the years. In the 250-odd years since it was written, has anything come to light that has challenged any of his major premises? Do Roman historians look favorably on him?
His major premise, that the empire fell because of Christianity and barbarians and the Romans becoming pussies, is challenged all the time. But modern historians taking a swing at Gibbon is like physics students criticizing Isaac Newton. I mean, seriously. It's not that they're wrong, it's that everyone sensible rolls their eyes because they'd rather talk about something interesting than hear some kid try to score "look at me!" points because he has the benefit of two hundred years of subsequent scholarship and a pocket calculator.

Modern scholarship on Gibbon has reached the meta stage where it's more interesting to examine his influence on the upper class of the British Empire, which was casting about for an identity to contrast with French and Spanish salon culture and found it in the Roman Empire. Anglo interest in Roman history remains fervent to this day. The Romans themselves would probably find this bewildering.

Fornadan
Dec 7, 2010

NightConqueror posted:

How has Gibbons' Decline and Fall held up over the years. In the 250-odd years since it was written, has anything come to light that has challenged any of his major premises? Do Roman historians look favorably on him?

Like any other 250 years old scientific work it is now severely dated, thanks to advances in source analysis and archaeology. He for instance uses the Histoia Augusta pretty uncritically. I wouldn't recommend reading Gibbon unless you're reading it as literature

Modern academics still cite him in their works though, I suspect largely out of tradition (or more cynically, to appear intellectual).

Unfortunately historians' understandable need to just cite their predecessors' works rather than to trace every little factoid back to the original source material leads occasionally to a kind of Historian's Whispering Game where what started out as idle speculation ends up as accepted fact. So for example the well known fact of the Germanic invaders crossing a frozen Rhine on 31 December 406 appear originate in some stray remarks by Gibbon

(And still some people doubt that the Romans invented most of what they thought they knew of their early history)

((I seem to be meandering off topic...))

Fornadan fucked around with this message at 18:43 on Jul 8, 2012

Iseeyouseemeseeyou
Jan 3, 2011

Fornadan posted:

Like any other 250 scientific work it is now severely dated, thanks to advances in source analysis and archaeology. He for instance uses the Histoia Augusta pretty uncritically. I wouldn't recommend reading Gibbon unless you're reading it as literature

Modern academics still cite him in their works though, I suspect largely out of tradition (or more cynically, to appear intellectual).

Unfortunately historians' understandable need to just cite their predecessors' works rather than to trace every little factoid back to the original source material leads occasionally to a kind of Historian's Whispering Game where what started out as idle speculation ends up as accepted fact. So for example the well known fact of the Germanic invaders crossing a frozen Rhine on 31 December 406 appear originate in some stray remarks by Gibbon

(And still some people doubt that the Romans invented most of what they thought they knew of their early history)

((I seem to be meandering off topic...))

How dare you suggest the romans didn't originate from Remus and Romulus being raised by a wolf giving them her milk! That's how's it goes right?

Also, Grand, do you watch Spartacus? If so what are you impressions of the arena we see on it?

MeinPanzer
Dec 20, 2004
anyone who reads Cinema Discusso for anything more than slackjawed trolling will see the shittiness in my posts

an skeleton posted:

Here's a question that may or may not have a real answer I guess: To those who are versed in history of other cultures/empires, which one contrasts the most with the Romans?

Contrasts in what way?

quote:

Why did Rome produce so little iron?

It didn't. The Romans mined and made use of huge amounts of iron.

By the way, data derived from Greenland ice core samples has shown that environmental pollution caused by lead and silver smelting was pretty significant during the early Empire, and the lead fallout from such activities was about 15% of that caused by all human activities in the northern hemisphere since the 1930s - in other words, the Romans smelted so much silver and lead that they caused widespread air pollution throughout the entire northern hemisphere.

Sungmin Hong, Jean-Pierre Candelone, Clair C. Patterson, and Claude F. Boutron, “Greenland Ice Evidence of Hemispheric Lead Pollution Two Millennia Ago by Greek and Roman Civilizations,” in Science 265, 5180 (1994): 1841-3.

MeinPanzer fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Jul 8, 2012

Teriyaki Hairpiece
Dec 29, 2006

I'm nae the voice o' the darkened thistle, but th' darkened thistle cannae bear the sight o' our Bonnie Prince Bernie nae mair.
Has anyone ever read the Harry Turtledove/Judith Tarr novel Household Gods? It's about a lady from the mid-late 1990's who gets propelled by plot device into 2nd century Pannonia. Not too bad, if you don't take it too seriously. It's a fun book to contrast to Lest Darkness Fall, wherein a 1930's professor goes to 6th century Rome and everything works out just fine for him.

Kaal
May 22, 2002

through thousands of posts in D&D over a decade, I now believe I know what I'm talking about. if I post forcefully and confidently, I can convince others that is true. no one sees through my facade.

MeinPanzer posted:

It didn't. The Romans mined and made use of huge amounts of iron.

To expand on this a bit, the Roman use of metal is only small when compared to the modern-day where the world produces 2.4 billion tons per year. They used it far, far more than any contemporaneous society. The conservative estimates were that Romans produced 82,500 tons per year, compared to 5,000 tons from China (their nearest competitor).

The biggest reason that the Romans didn't use metal more is because the techniques for making cast iron hadn't be disseminated yet. There was a handful of Chinese craftsmen who had been doing it on a small scale since 500 BC, but it took until the 14th century for those techniques to spread to Europe. Producing wrought iron is a much more labor-intensive process than casting, and cast iron is a more broadly useful metal in any case. And even then it took until the 18th century for coal-fueled blast furnaces to be invented, which was really when iron and steel production became truly affordable. Still the Romans were headed in that direction with their waterwheel-driven furnaces, coal mining and general engineering aptitude. If they had heard about the Chinese casting method I'm sure they would have figured out the technique. Since affordable iron production was the essential cause of the Industrial Revolution, there's a good chance they could have launched it 2,000 years early had they simply been aware of the process. Given their love of civil wars though, it probably would have most just led to some truly horrible fighting.

Kaal fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Jul 8, 2012

Iseeyouseemeseeyou
Jan 3, 2011

Kaal posted:

To expand on this a bit, the Roman use of metal is only small when compared to the modern-day where the world produces 2.4 billion tons per year. They used it far, far more than any contemporaneous society. The conservative estimates were that Romans produced 82,500 tons per year, compared to 5,000 tons from China (their nearest competitor).

The biggest reason that the Romans didn't use metal more is because the techniques for making cast iron hadn't be disseminated yet. There was a handful of Chinese craftsmen who had been doing it on a small scale since 500 BC, but it took until the 14th century for those techniques to spread to Europe. Producing wrought iron is a much more labor-intensive process than casting, and cast iron is a more broadly useful metal in any case. And even then it took until the 18th century for coal-fueled blast furnaces to be invented, which was really when iron and steel production became truly affordable. Still the Romans were headed in that direction with their waterwheel-driven furnaces, coal mining and general engineering aptitude. If they had heard about the Chinese casting method I'm sure they would have figured out the technique. Since affordable iron production was the essential cause of the Industrial Revolution, there's a good chance they could have launched it 2,000 years early had they simply been aware of the process. Given their love of civil wars though, it probably would have most just led to some truly horrible fighting.


Since Rome did business with the far east, is there any main reason why the techniques didn't reach Rome?

Jamwad Hilder
Apr 18, 2007

surfin usa

Iseeyouseemeseeyou posted:

Since Rome did business with the far east, is there any main reason why the techniques didn't reach Rome?

While Rome was able to get information and goods from China/East Asia, it's important to remember that it wasn't Chinese merchants interacting with Roman merchants, but rather a long string of intermediaries. The amount of time it would take for information (and goods for that matter) to reach China or Rome from the other literally took years, and to top it off the Parthians were located between China and Rome, and they were a rival and frequently hostile empire to Rome. So basically: long distance, lack of interest on the part of merchants, hostiles between Rome/China.

Grand Prize Winner
Feb 19, 2007


Question about Rome and the Gauls: I heard recently that your average Gaul was about a head taller than your average Roman. Is this true? If so, what's the source of the difference? Diet? Genetics?

DarkCrawler
Apr 6, 2009

by vyelkin

Grand Prize Winner posted:

Question about Rome and the Gauls: I heard recently that your average Gaul was about a head taller than your average Roman. Is this true? If so, what's the source of the difference? Diet? Genetics?

Head taller might be pushing it, but diet. Meat-eating pastoralists VS sedentary grain-chompers.

Grand Fromage
Jan 30, 2006

L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?


meatbag posted:

Why did Rome produce so little iron?

It's only little relative to the size of the empire and the availability of metal today. As posted, it was much higher production than any other ancient civilization, but still 83,000 tons a year isn't that much when you consider an empire that large with 50+ million people in it. It was enough for what they needed but not so much that they could run around wasting it.

NightConqueror posted:

How has Gibbons' Decline and Fall held up over the years? In the 250-odd years since it was written, has anything come to light that has challenged any of his major premises? Do Roman historians look favorably on him?

He still gets respect for being the first to really delve into it in the modern era, but no. Many of his conclusions were wrong, he wasn't very critical of his sources, and there's been a couple centuries of additional research and archaeology. He did the best he could in the circumstances, no one really criticizes him or thinks he's an rear end in a top hat. We just know more now, so we know a lot of what he wrote was wrong.

MeinPanzer posted:

in other words, the Romans smelted so much silver and lead that they caused widespread air pollution throughout the entire northern hemisphere.

That's way cool and not too surprising, they were easily the most industrial civilization prior to the industrial revolution.

Iseeyouseemeseeyou posted:

Also, Grand, do you watch Spartacus?

I've been meaning to but haven't yet.

DarkCrawler posted:

Head taller might be pushing it, but diet. Meat-eating pastoralists VS sedentary grain-chompers.

Could've been genetic factors too, they were distinct populations and we have average height differences between ethnicity now. I would almost guarantee you they weren't that much bigger though, the Roman sources liked to portray them as giant hulking barbarians. There's also a false modern perception that Romans were tiny.

I'm not sure how much of a diet difference there actually was, the Gauls were a settled urban civilization. The amount of information we have about pre-Roman Gaul is sadly minimal.

Apauling
Aug 25, 2003
How far south into Africa did Rome conquer and what stopped them from going further? Simply the Sahara?

Grand Fromage
Jan 30, 2006

L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?


Apauling posted:

How far south into Africa did Rome conquer and what stopped them from going further? Simply the Sahara?

Just the Mediterranean coastline, the big oases in Libya and Egypt, and down the Nile/Red Sea coastline some. There was no motivation to attempt to cross the Sahara.

Grand Prize Winner
Feb 19, 2007


Out of the things that we don't know about Rome, which gap in our knowledge do you think is most important?

Nenonen
Oct 22, 2009

Mulla on aina kolkyt donaa taskussa

Grand Fromage posted:

Just the Mediterranean coastline, the big oases in Libya and Egypt, and down the Nile/Red Sea coastline some. There was no motivation to attempt to cross the Sahara.

Besides, Sahara was swarming with Garamantians and other nasty sand people. Like with Caledonia, it was easier to just build a limes against them and occasionally go to raid their cities than to wage costly campaigns against them.

Rome had enemies/assets waiting for exploitation in every direction, but the riches were in Asia, not Sahara.

Grand Fromage
Jan 30, 2006

L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?


Grand Prize Winner posted:

Out of the things that we don't know about Rome, which gap in our knowledge do you think is most important?

Oh boy. Well, the most obvious one is the history of Rome prior to 400 BCE. We only have legends. Archaeology indicates Rome was around for ~350 years prior to our first written records but we really know nothing about it.

The records during the crisis of the third century are rather confused, it'd be nice to have some more reliable information about what happened then.

Personally, I'd like records of what happened in the west during the "dark ages" (historians hate this term), especially the period from 476 to the mid/late 600s when it appears Roman culture continued more or less unchanged under the new Germanic rulers.

Probably the most persistent gap is knowledge about the lower classes. This is a problem in all of history prior to the modern day. We have a decent amount of information but there's very little written by the lower classes, so the life of your average Gaius is something of a mystery throughout all of Roman history.

Nenonen posted:

Rome had enemies/assets waiting for exploitation in every direction, but the riches were in Asia, not Sahara.

Yup. It's easy to forget how much goddamn wealth there was out east, it drove the policy of many states. Rome only had so much manpower, why waste it trying to get across the Sahara when you could be trying to conquer Persia?

MeinPanzer
Dec 20, 2004
anyone who reads Cinema Discusso for anything more than slackjawed trolling will see the shittiness in my posts

Grand Prize Winner posted:

Question about Rome and the Gauls: I heard recently that your average Gaul was about a head taller than your average Roman. Is this true? If so, what's the source of the difference? Diet? Genetics?

quote:

Could've been genetic factors too, they were distinct populations and we have average height differences between ethnicity now. I would almost guarantee you they weren't that much bigger though, the Roman sources liked to portray them as giant hulking barbarians. There's also a false modern perception that Romans were tiny.

I'm not sure how much of a diet difference there actually was, the Gauls were a settled urban civilization. The amount of information we have about pre-Roman Gaul is sadly minimal.

The notion that Celts and Germans were significantly larger than Italians (or any Mediterraneans, really) was really a literary trope. Chances are that the average elite Celt was taller than the average elite Roman, especially since we know that the diet of the Celtic elite was very meat-heavy. The average Roman or Greek, however, was fairly tall, according to modern anthropometric research. Measurements of almost a thousand Italian adult male skeletons from 500 BC to 500 AD have shown that the average height was 5'6.4". The average height of Italian conscripts born in 1854 was 5'4"; the average Italian male of military age did not even match the average Roman male in height until 1956.

This is based primarily on G. Kron, "Anthropometry, Physical Anthropology, and the Reconstruction of Ancient Health, Nutrition, and Living Standards" Historia 54 (2005): 68-83

quote:

How far south into Africa did Rome conquer and what stopped them from going further? Simply the Sahara?

Augustus campaigned into ancient Ethiopia, in the modern Sudan, but no territory was held because it was just too far removed from Egypt, and transportation past the cataracts (the rapids in southern Egypt and Sudan) was difficult.

Jazerus
May 24, 2011


cheerfullydrab posted:

Has anyone ever read the Harry Turtledove/Judith Tarr novel Household Gods? It's about a lady from the mid-late 1990's who gets propelled by plot device into 2nd century Pannonia. Not too bad, if you don't take it too seriously. It's a fun book to contrast to Lest Darkness Fall, wherein a 1930's professor goes to 6th century Rome and everything works out just fine for him.

It's a pretty decent depiction of lower class frontier life and any book that includes Marcus Aurelius as a character wins points from me. I'd recommend picking it up from a library on those merits.

On the other hand, the main character is basically tumblrsocialjustice.txt and I was horribly frustrated by her sheer ignorance of antiquity, even the common sense sanitation stuff like not drinking water that still applies in places with poor sanitation today, so I really couldn't appreciate it as much as Lest Darkness Fall even though it's more plausible.

Grand Prize Winner posted:

Out of the things that we don't know about Rome, which gap in our knowledge do you think is most important?

Grand Fromage covered the huge gaps. While this isn't entirely Roman, one of the things I really wish we had is a better history of Carthage - one that isn't from a hostile perspective, at the very least. We have depressingly little knowledge of what Carthage was up to when it wasn't at war with one of the other great powers of the Mediterranean.

Fun fact: Rome and Carthage signed a treaty ending the Third Punic War in 1985 AD. It was the longest war in history (sort of).

Kemper Boyd
Aug 6, 2007

no kings, no gods, no masters but a comfy chair and no socks

Grand Fromage posted:

Probably the most persistent gap is knowledge about the lower classes. This is a problem in all of history prior to the modern day. We have a decent amount of information but there's very little written by the lower classes, so the life of your average Gaius is something of a mystery throughout all of Roman history.

This is a pretty interesting thing in history in general. The prof i studied under always recommended to lazy people to specialize in Middle Ages Scandinavian history, since you can read all literary sources for that in less than a week. And of course not a single source is anything from the lower classes. And the non-literary sources are sometime nothing more than educated guesses at what life could look like.

By the time you get to the 17th-18th centuries, you start finding a whole lot more material that originate from lower classes and such, once literacy started to become more widespread.

Grand Fromage
Jan 30, 2006

L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?


That's why graffiti and the Vindolanda tablets are so great, they represent some of the very few sources we have that were written by average lower-class Romans. The Vindolanda tablets also have the only thing directly written by a woman that I'm aware of in all of Roman history.

Edit: Guess I should post that one.

"Claudia Severa to her Lepidina greetings. On 11 September, sister, for the day of the celebration of my birthday, I give you a warm invitation to make sure that you come to us, to make the day more enjoyable for me by your arrival, if you are present (?). Give my greetings to your Cerialis. My Aelius and my little son send him (?) their greetings. I shall expect you sister. Farewell, sister my dearest soul, as I hope to prosper, and hail."

Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 11:32 on Jul 9, 2012

Hemp Knight
Sep 26, 2004
How do you know all this stuff, GF? Is it just from reading up on Rome, or did you take courses/study it?

Grand Fromage
Jan 30, 2006

L-l-look at you bar-bartender, a-a pa-pathetic creature of meat and bone, un-underestimating my l-l-liver's ability to metab-meTABolize t-toxins. How can you p-poison a perfect, immortal alcohOLIC?


Hemp Knight posted:

How do you know all this stuff, GF? Is it just from reading up on Rome, or did you take courses/study it?

Both. I majored in history, took every Roman related course my college offered (including a field study course in Italy), and read a lot.

sbaldrick
Jul 19, 2006
Driven by Hate

Fornadan posted:

Like any other 250 years old scientific work it is now severely dated, thanks to advances in source analysis and archaeology. He for instance uses the Histoia Augusta pretty uncritically. I wouldn't recommend reading Gibbon unless you're reading it as literature

Modern academics still cite him in their works though, I suspect largely out of tradition (or more cynically, to appear intellectual).

Unfortunately historians' understandable need to just cite their predecessors' works rather than to trace every little factoid back to the original source material leads occasionally to a kind of Historian's Whispering Game where what started out as idle speculation ends up as accepted fact. So for example the well known fact of the Germanic invaders crossing a frozen Rhine on 31 December 406 appear originate in some stray remarks by Gibbon

(And still some people doubt that the Romans invented most of what they thought they knew of their early history)

((I seem to be meandering off topic...))

Every good historian should read Gibbon, not because his work is top notch anymore but because of his historiography contribution. Every historian (at least as I was taught) tries to model there work after his rhythm within the work. Which is why any serious historian writes in his style.

Spiderfist Island
Feb 19, 2011

sbaldrick posted:

Every good historian should read Gibbon, not because his work is top notch anymore but because of his historiography contribution. Every historian (at least as I was taught) tries to model there work after his rhythm within the work. Which is why any serious historian writes in his style.

My Early Middle Ages professor structured his class as a critique of Gibbon's thesis (Rome fell because of Christian moral degradation and barbarism) and later Henri Pirenne's* (Islam's domination of the Mediterranean and trade therein forced western civilization's "center" to move north and develop into autarkic
kingdoms). The study of how history is studied is just as important as history itself.

If anyone's interested I can give a brief undergraduate engineer's summary of how Late Rome couldn't do without client barbarian tribes, and how tax evasion played into it.

*Pirenne, really, is a lot more important to modern Dark Ages Historiography than Gibbon's Enlightenment-fueled Christian-bashing which relies mainly on written/secondhand sources.

General Panic
Jan 28, 2012
AN ERORIST AGENT

Kaal posted:

To expand on this a bit, the Roman use of metal is only small when compared to the modern-day where the world produces 2.4 billion tons per year. They used it far, far more than any contemporaneous society. The conservative estimates were that Romans produced 82,500 tons per year, compared to 5,000 tons from China (their nearest competitor).

The biggest reason that the Romans didn't use metal more is because the techniques for making cast iron hadn't be disseminated yet.

I would imagine that without modern technology actually mining anything was probably really difficult and dangerous, too. Even if you were prepared to expend a lot of slave labour doing it, there must have been limits to how much ore the Romans could physically get out of the ground.

euphronius
Feb 18, 2009

General Panic posted:

I would imagine that without modern technology actually mining anything was probably really difficult and dangerous, too. Even if you were prepared to expend a lot of slave labour doing it, there must have been limits to how much ore the Romans could physically get out of the ground.

Why? You just dig holes or melt hillsides with water. Check this out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_M%C3%A9dulas

Though that was gold, not iron.

Shimrra Jamaane
Aug 10, 2007

Obscure to all except those well-versed in Yuuzhan Vong lore.
Are there any websites that really showcase the different types of legionnaire equipment over the history of Rome? What I mean by that is I would love to see side by side pictures of "Legionnaire in 100 BC" "Legionnaire in 50BC" etc. Like something you might find in an Osprey book. Is there anything like that?

Nenonen
Oct 22, 2009

Mulla on aina kolkyt donaa taskussa
One thing to consider with all ancient cultures: we only know bits and pieces of what they did with metal compared to what they did with stone and clay. Gold, silver, copper, bronze or iron can always be recycled, so for something to survive to our day it would have to have been

a) lost

b) held such historical or artistic value that people would not have melted the objects to just take the gold or silver.

And we know from the Spanish conquest of South America how likely b is.

Actually: do we have any metal objects that we know were looted eg. from Dacia by Romans and have survived through them to this day?

Iseeyouseemeseeyou
Jan 3, 2011

Nenonen posted:

One thing to consider with all ancient cultures: we only know bits and pieces of what they did with metal compared to what they did with stone and clay. Gold, silver, copper, bronze or iron can always be recycled, so for something to survive to our day it would have to have been

a) lost

b) held such historical or artistic value that people would not have melted the objects to just take the gold or silver.

And we know from the Spanish conquest of South America how likely b is.

Actually: do we have any metal objects that we know were looted eg. from Dacia by Romans and have survived through them to this day?

The gold and silver in quite a few coins :hist101:

Grand, what do you do?

Power Khan
Aug 20, 2011

by Fritz the Horse
some guys brought it up before: education.

i had some lectures about the history of science in my field of studies (politics), where the doc would point out that the organized connection of intellectual work and manual labor is a relatively new occurrence, namely, first established in rennaissance Italy. He then went on about how guys like Archimedes by antique standards were thought to be lesser men, doing manual labour (just for slaves and plebs) and experimenting, not just grasping the world with mental effort. For the slip you had to write a paper trying to prove him wrong.

Naturally you'd feel to challenge such a view if you look at the great architecture and such marvels of engineering as aqueducts and sewers that the romans left behind. You can't build things on that scale if you just have a small circle of tutor trained geniuses who know their stuff, you need guys much like the centurions, who are right in the middle, who make the connection between theory and praxis. I remember reading something about engineering corps attached to a legion in Tacitus, when he writes about the siege of Cremona. How where these men educated, How where architects educated? What's the relation of mental and manual labour in these terms, in a given period, let's say the principate?

Power Khan
Aug 20, 2011

by Fritz the Horse

Kemper Boyd posted:

This is a pretty interesting thing in history in general. The prof i studied under always recommended to lazy people to specialize in Middle Ages Scandinavian history, since you can read all literary sources for that in less than a week. And of course not a single source is anything from the lower classes. And the non-literary sources are sometime nothing more than educated guesses at what life could look like.

By the time you get to the 17th-18th centuries, you start finding a whole lot more material that originate from lower classes and such, once literacy started to become more widespread.

I'm currently reading on that myself atm, i mean the way history is told....isn't it inherently political what gets conserved? You might think that the antique world mainly consisted of soldiers, battles and aristocrats if you only go after the classical sources. Then there's the issue what got copied in the middle ages. Think of all the great works that some guy wiped his behind with or packed fish in, because he didn't understand or liked it. (As a sidenote, medieval copists weren't necessarily able to read)

Recently i saw something about some great, unknown mathematical work of the antique, where the pergamentum was reused to draw some saints and prayers on. Stuff like that is just :cripes:.

Spiderfist Island posted:

The study of how history is studied is just as important as history itself

Sir, you nailed it.

physeter
Jan 24, 2006

high five, more dead than alive

InspectorBloor posted:

I remember reading something about engineering corps attached to a legion in Tacitus, when he writes about the siege of Cremona. How where these men educated, How where architects educated? What's the relation of mental and manual labour in these terms, in a given period, let's say the principate?
We have only guesses really. Hand a hacksaw to a Roman noble and tell him to go make you a siege ladder, he'll look at you like you're insane. Leading and fighting is what he does, not labor. Probably never held a hammer in his life. Hand it to a ranker and you could be handing it to a kid who was harvesting a farm in the Italian foothills three weeks ago. Same problem. That boy has as much chance of building a ballista as he does of winning the Irish Sweepstakes.

It is virtually impossible to imagine that the Roman Empire was militarily so successful for so long without centralizing and deliberately administering some base of knowledge for the centurion corps. But where and how this was done remains a mystery. A collegium is likey. A library? Instructors? Assigned quaestors? An office in the SPQR freedmens bureacracy, increasing in power under Augustus is a good guess but doesn't answer the real questions. Did they just drink together in the off season, maybe draw catapult pictures on the wall for each other? Who orders the transfer of a centurion from one legion to another, and what prompts it? It happened all the time especially in the Imperial period, so someone must have cared enough to say, pick up Primus Pilus of VII and transfer him halfway across the known world to take over as PP of XX. These people are cross-training their officers before most of their contemporaries even HAVE officers.

Earlier in the thread someone asked about Roman special forces units. A reasonable question, considering. But while in today's militaries we identify gifted soldiers and segregate them into separate units, the Romans didn't do that. They identified them, presumably trained them, gave them a big raise and then rewove them into the fabric of conventional units, thereby strengthening the legion as a whole. But the precise mechanisms by which this was done are virtually unknown, which is frustrating, as there is no other more important human factor in Rome's explosive military success.

Good question by the way.

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mediadave
Sep 8, 2011
I volunteered very briefly at the numismatic library of the British Museum. Whilst there I read a couple of interesting articles about Roman tokens that no one knew what they were for - perhaps gaming purposes, perhaps ritual purposes..? Anyway, I've just tried to find reference to these on the internet, and all I can find are mentions of erotic tokens, probably for use in brothels. I'm starting to think that maybe the articles I read were actually talking about the erotic tokens but were just too old fashioned and buttoned up to mention that. Do you know anything about Roman - non monetary - tokens?


Also, do you know anything about those hexagonal spheres with holes in them? Any advances on ideas for what they were actually for?

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