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Admittedly the 50 % seem to be old numbers, and might be too high, as Nathan Pilkington argues in “Growing Up Roman: Infant Mortality and Reproductive Development.” But even he comes to 20-35 % (higher in slave and poor populations, lower in rich populations) in infant mortality alone, to this you have to add another 10 years the child has to survive. quote:On the low end of this range, women needed to produce nearly 6.5 children in order to replace themselves and quote:Based on a comparison of the data from Roman cemeteries with those of Guatemala and Trinitdad, 80 percent of the children quote:As mentioned above, infant-mortality rates as established by comparative anthropometry would seem to indicate a probable average The 30 % figure for childbirth death is the cumulated number over all birth a Roman woman would have birthing the assumed 4-6 children on average. It was not a 30 % to die at every childbirth. Decius fucked around with this message at 06:48 on Apr 13, 2018 |
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Apr 13, 2018 06:45
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Decius posted:The 30 % figure for childbirth death is the cumulated number over all birth a Roman woman would have birthing the assumed 4-6 children on average. It was not a 30 % to die at every childbirth. This fixes the math, thanks.
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Apr 13, 2018 07:01
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Can birthrates and chances of survival from the early Roman Empire vary from city to city, or are all these statistics are based on Rome's entire sovereignty?
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Apr 13, 2018 10:55
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The paper I cited looked at several regions and cities in Italy and Roman Egypt and came to this conclusion, yes. Varied by region and time. For example in Gaul (which includes Northern Italy) Malaria wasn't a risk, while it was a big killer of children in Southern and Central Italy.
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Apr 13, 2018 11:43
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Decius posted:Well, try, push her health, risk etc. is a whole different issue when there is no contraception and a 30 % chance of a woman to die at birth and 50 % chance of a kid not surviving until adulthood. Unless you were abstaining there wasn't really much to control getting pregnant or not. Augustus and Livia would deliberately avoid further pregnancies after a miscarriage a decade or so later, so it’s not like contemporary Romans couldn’t think of a way out of this problem. We don’t know if they used contraceptives like silphium or just abstained from sex for decades — rumor has it that Livia just picked a succession of other women for Augustus to bang, but who knows the truth of that. It’s tempting to read the two outcomes as indicative of a difference in character between Augustus and Pompey; then again maybe Julia just had worse luck.
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Apr 13, 2018 12:11
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That's actually kind of surprising given how dynasty minded he was. The books I read said it was a mystery why he never had any children with Livia, despite them both being provably fertile from previous marriages. None of them mentioned a stillbirth so this is cool and new to me. I always thought it plausible Augustus was sterile and his daughter wasn't actually his.
cheetah7071 fucked around with this message at 18:10 on Apr 13, 2018 |
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Apr 13, 2018 17:57
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Probably for the best, being named Augustus' heir was like being the drummer for Spinal Tap.
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Apr 13, 2018 18:03
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From how few Roman emperors managed to produce direct heirs, I wouldn't be surprised if they discovered purple snail dye caused impotence or something.
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Apr 13, 2018 18:54
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cheetah7071 posted:That's actually kind of surprising given how dynasty minded he was. The books I read said it was a mystery why he never had any children with Livia, despite them both being provably fertile from previous marriages. None of them mentioned a stillbirth so this is cool and new to me. I always thought it plausible Augustus was sterile and his daughter wasn't actually his. If Augustus had suspected that Scribonia had been messing around behind his back, he could certainly have accused her of that when he divorced her, right after Julia’s birth. He didn’t though (instead he complained that she had an unpleasant personality). I guess it’s not beyond belief that she had been messing around anyway though. SlothfulCobra posted:From how few Roman emperors managed to produce direct heirs, I wouldn't be surprised if they discovered purple snail dye caused impotence or something. Seems more like proper highborn Roman women caused impotence tbqh.
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Apr 13, 2018 19:25
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Being gay also seemed to cause a lack of babies
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Apr 13, 2018 19:26
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cheetah7071 posted:Being gay also seemed to cause a lack of babies A properly virile Roman can find time both to impregnate his wife and irrumate several slave boys before cena Real talk though, late republican Roman aristos did seem to have a hard time replacing their population and I don’t think there is a single totally convincing theory which explains why. Probably a combination of high attrition in childbirth and childhood, also high attrition in adulthood, cursus honorum frequently keeping men away from their wives, financial inconvenience of having to provide for the careers and inheritances of multiple sons, ease of adopting someone else’s kid if you REALLY need an heir now...
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Apr 13, 2018 19:35
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I imagine the hundreds of slave girls they owned who they could do extremely freaky stuff to without being divorced and publicly shamed kept them out of their wive's beds some percentage of the time they were home
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Apr 13, 2018 19:37
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WoodrowSkillson posted:I was under the impression the Maniple system also saw the transition away from hoplite equipment as well as tactics. I'm having a devil of a time trying to find info on this on the net at the moment, but I thought the Romans simply used a local short sword up until they took the design of the gladius hispaniensis from the spanish tribes. Anyone have a picture of what a pre-gladius Roman sword looked like? Google is failing me.
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Apr 14, 2018 10:27
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SimonCat posted:Anyone have a picture of what a pre-gladius Roman sword looked like? Google is failing me. Far as I know we don't actually have any examples or descriptions of them. This is an Etruscan sword from the 400s BCE:  I would guess the Romans were using these, or something like a Greek xiphos.
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Apr 14, 2018 10:41
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skasion posted:Augustus and Livia would deliberately avoid further pregnancies after a miscarriage a decade or so later, so it’s not like contemporary Romans couldn’t think of a way out of this problem. We don’t know if they used contraceptives like silphium or just abstained from sex for decades Or he just pulled out. It's unreliable enough you wouldn't want to do that in the modern day when decent condoms and hormonal birth control are ubiquitous, but it is a lot better than nothing.
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Apr 14, 2018 10:59
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Grand Fromage posted:Far as I know we don't actually have any examples or descriptions of them. This is an Etruscan sword from the 400s BCE: Amazing how big the knowledge gaps we have can be. We don't know what weapon one of the most influential powers in history used for... at least the better part of a century?
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Apr 14, 2018 16:50
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Well, weapons and armor don't survive very often because they get reused or recycled. We have very few actual extant examples of them. The reason why the classic Roman in lorica segmentata is the image we have of legionaries is there's good art of them on things like Trajan's Column, so we know pretty well what they looked like. There's a lot of military stuff where we don't have good text descriptions either, because consider the audience Romans were writing for. They didn't expect this stuff to be read in 2000 years, so they skip things that are common knowledge. It'd be like you writing a book on warfare today. Are you going to take a couple pages to describe what a gun is or how it works? Everybody knows that already. But a historian in the future might not, and if your book is the only one that survives, welp. Spears were the primary weapon before the gladius, and there's some legend about how Roman swords would just break in half against Gallic ones which was why they adopted the foreign tech. If there's more detail than that I've never encountered it--doesn't mean it's not out there of course, I haven't read everything.
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Apr 14, 2018 17:19
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Grand Fromage posted:. It'd be like you writing a book on warfare today. Are you going to take a couple pages to describe what a gun is or how it works? Well I mean there are definitely SOME people who absolutely do go into every detail of weapons,
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Apr 14, 2018 17:24
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Tunicate posted:Well I mean there are definitely SOME people who absolutely do go into every detail of weapons, Sure, but 99.99% of the books aren't going to survive. Unless you happen to get Gun Weeb's book, good luck.
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Apr 14, 2018 17:26
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feedmegin posted:Or he just pulled out. It's unreliable enough you wouldn't want to do that in the modern day when decent condoms and hormonal birth control are ubiquitous, but it is a lot better than nothing.
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Apr 14, 2018 19:10
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Grand Fromage posted:Well, weapons and armor don't survive very often because they get reused or recycled. We have very few actual extant examples of them. The reason why the classic Roman in lorica segmentata is the image we have of legionaries is there's good art of them on things like Trajan's Column, so we know pretty well what they looked like. I had a Prof. once refer to trying to figure out Roman military stuff as being like trying to write about the US Army based on Beetle Bailey comic strips.
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Apr 14, 2018 23:41
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Cessna posted:I had a Prof. once refer to trying to figure out Roman military stuff as being like trying to write about the US Army based on Beetle Bailey comic strips. And as tough as figuring out the army is, the Roman navy is even more of a mystery since they never cared that much for it. It was always a service that they recognized was necessary given, y'know, Mare Nostrum but got no respect.
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Apr 15, 2018 03:27
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Grand Fromage posted:Unless you happen to get Gun Weeb's book, good luck. The greatest and worst resource of future historians on 21st century military history is going to be some gun nut's right-wing wank fantasy about survivalists overthrowing the US government.
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Apr 15, 2018 15:06
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HEY GUNS posted:it may be unreliable but it was probably more reliable back when dicey nutrition made you less fertile True but I don't think the Emperor of Rome specifically was missing many meals 
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Apr 15, 2018 15:22
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feedmegin posted:True but I don't think the Emperor of Rome specifically was missing many meals Augustus was a snacker who ate sparingly at meals, apparently. Suetonius has a surprising amount to say about his diet.
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Apr 15, 2018 15:35
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Tomn posted:The greatest and worst resource of future historians on 21st century military history is going to be some gun nut's right-wing wank fantasy about survivalists overthrowing the US government. I'm picturing an argument in the year 3018 between historians centered on whether the warrior tribe known as the wehraboos was real or just a myth.
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Apr 15, 2018 15:41
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I feel bad for the future grad student who has to piece together information about the Pacific Theater from the only surviving extant source - one of those anime where the ships are personified as schoolgirls.
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Apr 15, 2018 16:12
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Mantis42 posted:I feel bad for the future grad student who has to piece together information about the Pacific Theater from the only surviving extant source - one of those anime where the ships are personified as schoolgirls. far more than they ever wanted to, in fact
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Apr 15, 2018 19:54
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Some day, anime will be in archeological museums
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Apr 15, 2018 20:03
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feedmegin posted:True but I don't think the Emperor of Rome specifically was missing many meals we still hit puberty way earlier than people used to though, even the elite, and i assumed that was an example of diet?
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Apr 15, 2018 20:06
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HEY GUNS posted:we still hit puberty way earlier than people used to though, even the elite, and i assumed that was an example of diet? It doesn't correlate with BMI like has been assumed but a higher intake of sugar and fat might be related. And so might environmental pollution. Although I'm not sure if that has any relevance to fertility
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Apr 15, 2018 20:12
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Ras Het posted:It doesn't correlate with BMI like has been assumed but a higher intake of sugar and fat might be related. And so might environmental pollution. Although I'm not sure if that has any relevance to fertility
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Apr 15, 2018 20:22
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Do children in places with worse nutrition today hit puberty later? That'd be much easier to investigate than historical puberty
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Apr 15, 2018 20:24
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HEY GUNS posted:The whole thing is skewed by the fact that we (or I at least--not a specialist) have hard data for the present time but none for the periods we are comparing the present time with. Only anecdotes, like how Bach's voice didn't break until he was seventeen. I mean we do know with great certainty that the age of onset of puberty in girls has gone from around 14 to around 10 in the last hundred years. Even if we just had anecdotes the change would be obvious. Whether the data from the early 20th century helps with understanding much earlier time periods is much less clear of course
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Apr 15, 2018 20:40
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The role of bio active plasticizers is still very poorly understood. There's a ton of plastic in food and drink now, plus plastic decomposition products that inevitably get made during the molding process. There was the bisphenol scare a few years ago that IMO is justified. I have done a little lab work on plastics QA and there's an rear end ton of small organic molecules that are known to be bioavailable that end up in food containers.
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Apr 15, 2018 20:51
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Sarern posted:I'm picturing an argument in the year 3018 between historians centered on whether the warrior tribe known as the wehraboos was real or just a myth.
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Apr 18, 2018 22:44
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I think it's kind of cool that human civilization could completely vanish tomorrow and in 3 thousand years the Great Pyramids will still be around as a monument.
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Apr 19, 2018 00:27
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This might be a little off topic, but who are the Phoenicians and what happened to them exactly ?
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Apr 19, 2018 00:54
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Chamuska posted:This might be a little off topic, but who are the Phoenicians and what happened to them exactly ? They're the people who lived in the Levant about two thousand years ago or so. The Canaanites in the bible are a subsociety of them. "Phoenecian" was the Greek name for them, not the name they had for themselves. As for what happened to them, I don't think anything "happened" to them. Their descendants are still living in the Levant, we just call them Arabs now. cheetah7071 fucked around with this message at 01:06 on Apr 19, 2018 |
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Apr 19, 2018 00:57
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Chamuska posted:This might be a little off topic, but who are the Phoenicians and what happened to them exactly ? they're one of the canaanite peoples; they built a huge trade network and series of colonies throughout the mediterranean, and originated in canaan (palestine/israel). the assyrian, egyptian, persian, greek, roman, etc. conquests essentially slowly eroded their independence and cultural distinctiveness, but their most successful colony, carthage, continued to thrive for centuries after the "original phoenicians" (i.e. the canaanite merchant city states) themselves faded out of prominence somewhat.
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Apr 19, 2018 01:05
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