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Anthropologists Say Gladiators and Soldiers in Ancient Rome Were Vegetarian

83 points by Osiris30 8y ago

deleted 8y ago
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umvi 8y ago
An interesting hypothesis, but I have a hard time buying it. If everyone around them is eating meat, where's the motive for them to abstain? > Plants contain higher levels of strontium than animal tissues. People who consume more plants and less meat will build up measurably higher levels of strontium in their bones. How can we rule out that they weren't just eating tons of strontium-rich meat like seafood and less strontium-deficient meat like chicken? Or that they weren't just eating WAY MORE plant carbs than your average person being warriors and all? Maybe gladiators were like marathon runners and were always carb-loading to pack calories. That would effectively multiply their plant over meat intake by orders of magnitude. But just because marathon runners eat way more grains than meat doesn't mean they are vegetarians.
- elif 8y ago
  You don't have to subscribe to a 21st century hypothesis, you simply have to believe or disbelieve the credibility of authors at the time describing the gladiator diet. This article is not controversial news, but scientific support for the existing narrative.
- will_brown 8y ago
  > If everyone around them is eating meat, where's the motive for them to abstain? Presumably as a gladiatorial slave you wouldnt need to worry about abstaining from food choices. I’m a marathon runner and my best runs are in full on ketosis. I’ve experimented with a vegitarian ketosis diet but never did a full marathon while eating like that, but felt pretty good otherwise. There are some UFC fighters who eat vegetarian, paleo, keto, some trying the “warrior diet” (which I think is like paleo with some intermittent fasting...but not entirely sure what those athletes are really doing daily). It’s also worth noting most of the recent studies on gladiators also suggest they were not lean and resembled more of the strongman contest physiques.
  - ryanmercer 8y ago
    >Presumably as a gladiatorial slave you wouldnt need to worry about abstaining from food choices. It is worth noting that many gladiators, and Olympic competitors, were in fact not slaves and many were actually quite wealthy. Gladiators would do alright purely off of sexual relationships, rather high-class Roman maids and matrons like Hippia actually walked away from her family to be with a gladiator. There are many rumors from the time that allege various sons of powerful people to be bastard offspring of gladiators. There's even tell of some being 'the care and suffering of women' such as one byt he name of Hermes that Martial wrote of. You can tell how wealthy some were simply by looking at the fines issued to them. If you look at charioteers Theogenes and Porphyrius you can see good examples, Theogenes for example was once fined 2 talents for withdrawing from an event (about 250k dollars). If you look at a 2nd century prize table from Aphrodisias you see 500-3000 drachmas and there were several games referred to as 'the 3000-drachma Games', some would see prizes of 6000 drachma and in at least one instance of 30,000 drachma (about 100 years of a solderier's pay) being paid for a single athlete just to appear. At the Panathenaic games the lowest prize was 100 amphrae of olive oil, about 225k$ worth and winners were often fed by their home city for life if they won. Diocles, another charioteer, would compete for prizes up to 60,000 sesterces at a time which would be worth 2.5-3 million dollars today and if you look at his known life time winnings you get 35.8 million sesterces making him a billionaire and then some in today's dollars.
    - warent 8y ago
      Where did you learn all this? I feel like I could have kept reading this post forever. If you have any books to recommend, that would be amazing.
      - ryanmercer 8y ago
        A book titled "Manthropology: The Science of Why the Modern Male Is Not the Man He Used to Be" by Peter McAllister (bahahaha I just realized that's the same name from Home Alone). Everything in the book should be taken as liberal interpretation of history, however that being said he does cite where he gets facts and figures from so you can do your own research of the subjects. Here's a source of the 30k figure https://books.google.com/books?id=QMgsAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA74&lpg=PA74&dq=30,000+drachma+inscription&source=bl&ots=xAAKo4aegQ&sig=vcQu_BUxGqNpnrBeaUVWG8jxTWA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj9q4nPlYTfAhUHvFkKHeB6Cz4Q6AEwBHoECAUQAQ#v=onepage&q=30%2C000%20drachma%20inscription&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=QMgsAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA74&lpg=P... Here's an article that actually puts Diocles worth 15 billion https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7942699/Wealth-of-todays-sports-stars-is-no-match-for-the-fortunes-of-Romes-chariot-racers.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/794...
- forkLding 8y ago
  I'm thinking its more to do with the fact that meat was expensive and takes much more effort to cook back then, not that they were willing to just eat grains and vegetables, likely grains and vegetables were cheap and much easier to cook. Farmed meat was a luxury in Roman times and game or wild meat was likely also expensive enough to not be eaten every day. We live in different times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Roman_cuisine/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Roman_cuisine/ https://www.historyhit.com/what-did-the-romans-eat-food-and-drink-in-ancient-times/ https://www.historyhit.com/what-did-the-romans-eat-food-and-... https://www.quora.com/What-did-soldiers-eat-in-the-Ancient-Roman-Army https://www.quora.com/What-did-soldiers-eat-in-the-Ancient-R... https://www.thoughtco.com/did-roman-soldiers-eat-meat-120634 https://www.thoughtco.com/did-roman-soldiers-eat-meat-120634
  - yuy910616 8y ago
    right that's the first thing I thought of as well. If they had access to big mac they'd be eating that all the time
  - rmykhajliw 8y ago
    Totally agree. Meat is expensive, so general fighter can't get one. Another issue meat is perishable product, that's why you just can't really on meat in a war time when supply chain may be broken. It's the same idea was used during Civil War when soldiers main ration was griffins (salty flour crackers) - 2000 years and nothing changed.
- tracker1 8y ago
  Agreed... given the training regimes, they were probably consuming more than twice the amount of total food of people today. Which likely means they are eating a lot of foods from barley, etc. That doesn't preclude the intake of meat. Beyond that, it's 0.8-1.2g of protein are recommended MINIMUM daily intake to avoid diseases originating from protein deficiencies. At 220# that means 80-120g protein as a minimum. That's a fair amount, and far more than you're likely to get from vegetarian sources at the time alone. There's also a minimum amount of essential fatty acids to consider... at the time it's not like they had canola oil. So there was definitely animal products in their diets. Revisionist theories in order to support a vegetarian agenda are pretty annoying to me. A lot of it doesn't even pass a common sense sniff test. IIRC Barley + Lentils can give you a complete protein profile, and it's possible that maybe 1/3-1/2 of their protein intake was from non-meat sources. But I seriously doubt that even a significant minority were abstaining from meat.
  - fouc 8y ago
    80 grams of protein is 320 calories. 220lbs male needs to eat at least 2000 calories (basal metabolic rate), likely closer to 3000-4000 after all the exercise. So protein only constitutes 12% or less of their caloric source. Just about all food have some proportion of protein. Cooked oatmeal is 16% protein by calories.
    - tracker1 8y ago
      I've seen a reference in another quote that suggests 78% if diet from carb sources... that leaves 12% from meat. That is emphatically NOT vegetarian by any modern definition. edit: could include fish, depending on the location.
      - will_brown 8y ago
        Your math is off by 10%. And saying 78% carbs in no way implies the rest is meat. The remaining 22% could be non animal sources of fats and protein. I’ve done vegitarian keto where about 70% of my daily intake is non animal fat, 15-20% non animal protein and 10-15% carbs.
- simonsarris 8y ago
  Yeah this article is a little too glib in its conclusion. Obviously, 'ate plenty of vegetable matter' !== vegetarian. Then without a discussion of logistics and pricing of specific foods at the time, its odd to try and conclude intention vs necessity, etc. > we should expect that gladiators had a high protein diet. However, analysis of their bones has put forward the hypothesis that gladiators were vegetarian athletes Who says that a mostly vegetarian is low-protein? No mention of specific foods that were eaten in ancient Rome, such as lupines ("lupini beans"), which are low carb high protein and easily dehydrated, transported, etc, and would make an obvious staple for soldiers. As you say, what if the roman soldiers ate mostly lupines + dried fish? And perhaps not because they thought it was ideal for a warrior (though it may be), but simply because they were easy to carry?
- Someone 8y ago
  ”If everyone around them is eating meat” Is that likely? Per calorie, meat is more expensive, and people weren’t that rich, on average, at the time. Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Roman_cuisine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Roman_cuisine states: John E. Stambaugh writes that meat "was scarce except at sacrifices and the dinner parties of the rich." Also, gladiators may have been loading carbs to gain a protective layer of fat. https://archive.archaeology.org/0811/abstracts/gladiator.html https://archive.archaeology.org/0811/abstracts/gladiator.htm...: ”Gladiators, it seems, were fat. Consuming a lot of simple carbohydrates, such as barley, and legumes, like beans, was designed for survival in the arena. Packing in the carbs also packed on the pounds. "Gladiators needed subcutaneous fat," Grossschmidt explains. "A fat cushion protects you from cut wounds and shields nerves and blood vessels in a fight." Not only would a lean gladiator have been dead meat, he would have made for a bad show. Surface wounds "look more spectacular," says Grossschmidt. "If I get wounded but just in the fatty layer, I can fight on," he adds. "It doesn't hurt much, and it looks great for the spectators."”
  - SerLava 8y ago
    I'm trying to imagine a gash in my fat gladiator arm that's big enough to see from across the Colosseum and describing it as "doesn't hurt much."
    - kbutler 8y ago
      It's just a flesh wound!
    - Someone 8y ago
      Blood conveniently is an intense red and it can spread over a large area without losing much of its color. A nosebleed, for example, can look quite dramatic. Pain also is highly subjective, and can depend on psychological factors. A gladiator may have thought “that looks as if I fought hard, so they will let me live, and it is survivable”, rather than “that’s half an inch deep, bleeds like , and I will never be able to use that arm again!” Regardless, that gash in your fat arm easily beats an equally sized gash hitting a major artery or cutting into a bone.
- 1111111111z12 8y ago
  > An interesting hypothesis This is not a hypothesis (a speculation to be confirmed or denied), this is a conclusion derived from a series of palaeoethnobotanical and stable isotope analysis studies.
21 8y ago
> The legionnaire's daily ration consisted of 78% carbohydrates, mainly from wheat or barley While calling that "vegetarian" is technically correct, it's not really what people understand by "vegetarian".
- 1024core 8y ago
  What, wheat and barley are not vegetarian?
  - umvi 8y ago
    GP's point was: Maximus's diet consists of 78% cereals and grains and 22% meats. Is Maximus a vegetarian?
    - simias 8y ago
      I don't understand, where does it say that the remaining 22% are from meats?
      - sdinsn 8y ago
        It also doesn't say that the remaining 22% aren't from meat.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    - 1024core 8y ago
      There are these things called "vegetables" which some people eat. You may have heard of them? And then there's dairy (like milk and cheese). Just because someone's diet is vegetarian, it does not mean that they must exclusively eat wheat or barley.
  - sdinsn 8y ago
    > 78%
- boyband6666 8y ago
strict9 8y ago
Ethical and environmental debates aside, I chose to be a vegetarian 10 years ago as a way of forcing myself to have diversity in what I consume. It was too easy to fall into the trap of eating junk. Giving up meat doesn't ensure health by any stretch, but it does force you to consider and plan what you eat. It's worked out well for me. aside: dietary preferences aren't an affront to someone else's lifestyle or eating decisions. I don't judge meat eaters, I hope you won't judge those who choose not to.
- malikNF 8y ago
  I recently started preferring the vegetarian option over the non-veg one. And what you say exactly is the same problem I am facing, having to come up with what to eat. With meat its really easy to come up with what to eat, but whenever I try to think of something vegetarian it gets hard. Do you have any tips for someone starting to switch to a vegetarian diet? Especially when it comes to variety and how I can do this a bit easier?
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    Look at Indian cuisine. They have a ton of vegetarian options.
  - warent 8y ago
    > "Whenever I try to think of something vegetarian it gets hard. Do you have any tips for someone starting to switch to a vegetarian diet? Especially when it comes to variety and how I can do this a bit easier?" Having the raw ingredients available is like knowing syntax/functions to a programming language but not having the experience to structure it. There are so many frameworks/libraries/tutorials (recipes) that already exist so you don't have to spend copious amounts of time with trial and error. What I do is I'll sit down and search the web for vegetarian recipes that look good and commit to making them on certain days. Also I never thought I'd be recommending anything Buzzfeed related to anyone, but actually a good source is "Tasty Vegetarian" (https://www.facebook.com/tastyvegetarian/ https://www.facebook.com/tastyvegetarian/) which posts random vegetarian recipes that are really easy to make (I've had really good ones and also some kind of bad ones. If it's bad, usually the comments will be full of people complaining)
msiyer 8y ago
I am not surprised at all. I am from India. Most people I knew in my childhood were vegetarians. I knew a few wrestlers who practiced in the "akhadas" of Varanasi. Big guys, all "Hanuman" devotees, celibates (Brahmacharis) and vegetarians. Sushil Kumar the wrestler, Olympics medal winner, is a vegetarian: https://www.petaindia.com/blog/sushil-kumar/ https://www.petaindia.com/blog/sushil-kumar/ EDIT: People are getting triggered left and right. Man, this is the truth in the East. We were\are mostly vegetarians. Only recently did we start eating western food. Only recently did we see people getting terribly obese and chronically sick.
- InGodsName 8y ago
  What's surprising? You can get enough protein from milk based products and eggs. One scoop (40g) whey contains 25-30g protein
  - msiyer 8y ago
    Eggs are not vegetarian.
    - warent 8y ago
      Eggs are not vegan, but they are vegetarian ("ovo-vegetarian")
      - msiyer 8y ago
        Please read the definitions clearly. How can an animal product be vegetarian? Does it even make sense? Ovo-vegetarianism = eggs + vegetarian food. This is certainly not eggs = vegetarian.
        warent 8y ago
        I'm just explaining what is actually being communicated in the veg culture (at least in the US). Just about any vegetarian and vegan knows the distinction: vegetarians are known to consume dairy/eggs/honey, vegans do not. If a vegetarian doesn't eat eggs, they will say "I'm a vegetarian, but I don't eat eggs either" So basically when you read "vegetarian" you can safely assume it's shorthand for "ovo-lacto-vegetarian"
empath75 8y ago
Meat was expensive, grain was cheap.
diego 8y ago
> previous reviews of the scientific literature have concluded that a well-planned and varied vegetarian diet can meet the needs of athletes, as it was for Roman gladiators or legionnaires. What does this even mean? "Meet the needs" is relative to a certain quality of life. Even if the gladiators or legionnaires were vegetarian (questionable even with the paper's assumptions), who knows what their quality of life was. Probably not acceptable to our standards.
bryanrasmussen 8y ago
All the time, never any deviation? I understand it was expensive, so they never got a treat for doing good?
deleted 8y ago
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downrightmike 8y ago
A large part of being a soldier was that you had your own land that you could produce enough food to survive and buy equipment go to war. War where you could capture slaves to work your land and and riches to afford more land. The idea of the state providing the means and equipment to send soldiers to war only happened in the later era where men couldn't get land because of the artistocrats owning it all and the state had to outfit them so they could go to war.
- z3phyr 8y ago
  This is true for The early and middle republic Rome, but after the Marian Reforms, and especially during the Principate, Rome maintained a state sponsored standing army, with standardized arms. Of course after the crisis and eventual fall of Rome, it went back the older way
loourr 8y ago
Bullshit. Maybe they were forced to be a vegetarian when they couldn't get meat. Also, it's not like they had modern vegetarian protein powders and supplements which are most likely being used in their assessment of the modern vegetarian athlete. And it's super flawed reasoning to assume that because they have markers of eating plant-based food, they therefore only ate plant-based food. This just seems like vegetarian propaganda masquerading as science.
- cmrdporcupine 8y ago
  It's not even new information -- it has been known by historians for decades that most non-elite Romans had no ability to regularly consume meat and they existed on a heavy carbohydrate diet supplemented by seafood when they could get it. It's one of the things remarked on by contemporary Romans about their Germanic and Celtic foes -- that they ate so much meat, that they used 'disgusting' animal fats (lard and butter) instead of olive oils in their cooking. And that they were much taller. Likely because of higher meat and dairy consumption over several generations. The Roman agricultural economy could not support high meat consumption.
alisson 8y ago
A good resume from Nutrition Facts with a few other related papers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2e9sLsCowaE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2e9sLsCowaE
- zefe563s 8y ago
  Ah yes Michael Greger the plant-based quack M.D https://i.imgur.com/Bl5Kq4w.jpg https://i.imgur.com/Bl5Kq4w.jpg
brahmwg 8y ago
Isn't it more likely they were vegetarians not by choice but because they were essentially slaves, being fed the cheapest food possible (grains, etc)? Though I'm sure many will use this as evidence in favor of vegetarianism... "Yeah but even the mighty gladiators were vegans!" Anecdote storytime; I was actually born and raised into a vegetarian household, and spent the first approx 22 years of my life as a vegetarian. Then I switched to eating meat (really, just chicken and fish, maybe red meat once a year) and for me I feel healthier this way. When eating meat I can just eat less total volume of food to get the same amount of calories and nutrients compared to fueling up on a plant based diet. I love running, hiking and rock climbing, and nothing quite hits the spot like a nice protein rich chicken sandwich after a day in the mountains. YMMV, but for me, for now, I think I will continue with my consumption of animal flesh. I think to pull off the veg diet you have to carefully measure and monitor things, you can't just omit entire food groups from your diet and expect to be healthy. It's very naive but many vegan and vegetarians think this way; As long as the food has that VeganTM label, it must be good, why bother even checking the ingredients? Tldr; ex-vegetarian since birth prefers chicken sandwiches for climber fuel
- warent 8y ago
  > "It's very naive but many vegan and vegetarians think this way; As long as the food has that VeganTM label, it must be good, why bother even checking the ingredients?" This has not been my experience. The vegetarians and vegans I meet are typically very conscious of what they're putting into their bodies. The evidence is that you can be a great climber (the world's greatest free-solo climber Alex Honnold is a vegetarian.) or a gladiator without meat , and the humans' insatiable meat consumption is ruining the environment even more quickly than oil. But I wish more people who ate meat had your disposition--at least have it in moderation rather than every single kind of meat piled on a plate 3 times a day 7 days a week which is basically the norm and sadly barely hyperbolic.
  - brahmwg 8y ago
    You're right, I'm sure there are alot of very health conscious vegetarians who actively monitor their health. Perhaps that's actually more common. My experience has been, perhaps contrarily, that the vegan/vegetarians I've met think that by simply omitting meat they don't need to be concerned about monitoring their health. Since that was my observation and was counter intuitive I thought I'd share.
LoSboccacc 8y ago
The real issue with meat was that it spoils easily on a military campaign and it's hard to be cured on campsites. That's logistic 101, the nutritionist angle is not needed and borderline revisionistic. If you prefer citations instead of logic "The logistic of Roman army at war" by Roth also gives out all the needed information and points to the archeological evidence. The provided food was what could be transported, while the foraged included game and other meats, in moderations because of costs, spoiling, and other.
imgabe 8y ago
> Considering the modern diets of strength athletes, we should expect that gladiators had a high protein diet. Why should we expect that? Gladiators were slaves. I would expect slave owners to feed their slaves as cheaply as possible. What evidence is there that they even considered diet to be a factor in athletic performance and that they would try to maximize nutrition if they did?
spraak 8y ago
Dr. Greger just released a video about this, too -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2e9sLsCowaE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2e9sLsCowaE
nerpderp82 8y ago
Vegetarian diets were easier to transport, so it could be a primarily logistical issue. An Army moves on its stomach. Much of Napoleons speed over land was due to how quickly and stably they could move food due to canning. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/03/01/147751097/why-napoleon-offered-a-prize-for-inventing-canned-food https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/03/01/147751097/why-...
peterwwillis 8y ago
The article says the higher levels of strontium in their bones is from vegetables, but this source[1] says it's from consuming a tonic of plant ashes after their fights. They're trying to then correlate this to vegetarianism, but it's unrelated: they were artificially increasing their strontium-calcium ratio. It's pretty well documented that bread and porridge were the staple foods of the Roman world[2]. You could mix anything into your porridge, from vegetables and dried fruits to expensive things like olive oil, meat and fish. Garum, a fish-based condiment, was put on everything. Their higher carb intake is probably not because they were avoiding meat or protein, but because they just needed more calories, and carbs like grains and beans are a cheap plentiful source of them. There were many different kinds of gladiator from all walks of life, so it's insane to think at least some didn't eat meat. In fact, in the bone studies quoted, at least 2 of the 22 gladiators analyzed showed elevated consumption of meat. If you're a slave gladiator and your owner is a cheap bastard, then your dinner (like the rest of the poor people of Rome) will be mostly carbs. But if you're a well-off gladiator, you probably ate meat when you felt like it. [1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141020090006.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141020090006.h... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Roman_cuisine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Roman_cuisine
- Balgair 8y ago
  >Garum, a fish-based condiment, was put on everything. Aside: It's always been so interesting to me to learn about the smells, flavors, and real life of people back then. Garum is a perfect example of this. The Romans really did put the stuff on everything. It's not just a fish based condiment, it was a very integral part of Roman food and life. You make it by fermenting fish in salt in the Mediterranean sun for a few months and then go about straining the 'pulp' until it runs clear (there is a LOT more to it than that, but thems the basics). Think something like fish sauce. Modern versions are very savory and deep in flavor; super umami sauce. Such things are, today, very foreign seeming. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLDlUGXJMFY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLDlUGXJMFY https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garum https://www.amazon.com/Nettuno-Colatura-Anchovy-Sauce-Campania/dp/B000CRIFGM https://www.amazon.com/Nettuno-Colatura-Anchovy-Sauce-Campan... (a modern type of Garum)
marshray 8y ago
The reasoning I heard was that since most gladiators were unlikely to make it past the first few fights, why waste expensive food on them? For celebrity gladiators I imagine the calculation was different.

83 points by Osiris30 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

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umvi 8y ago

An interesting hypothesis, but I have a hard time buying it. If everyone around them is eating meat, where's the motive for them to abstain? > Plants contain higher levels of strontium than animal tissues. People who consume more plants and less meat will build up measurably higher levels of strontium in their bones. How can we rule out that they weren't just eating tons of strontium-rich meat like seafood and less strontium-deficient meat like chicken? Or that they weren't just eating WAY MORE plant carbs than your average person being warriors and all? Maybe gladiators were like marathon runners and were always carb-loading to pack calories. That would effectively multiply their plant over meat intake by orders of magnitude. But just because marathon runners eat way more grains than meat doesn't mean they are vegetarians.

elif 8y ago
You don't have to subscribe to a 21st century hypothesis, you simply have to believe or disbelieve the credibility of authors at the time describing the gladiator diet. This article is not controversial news, but scientific support for the existing narrative.
will_brown 8y ago
> If everyone around them is eating meat, where's the motive for them to abstain? Presumably as a gladiatorial slave you wouldnt need to worry about abstaining from food choices. I’m a marathon runner and my best runs are in full on ketosis. I’ve experimented with a vegitarian ketosis diet but never did a full marathon while eating like that, but felt pretty good otherwise. There are some UFC fighters who eat vegetarian, paleo, keto, some trying the “warrior diet” (which I think is like paleo with some intermittent fasting...but not entirely sure what those athletes are really doing daily). It’s also worth noting most of the recent studies on gladiators also suggest they were not lean and resembled more of the strongman contest physiques.
- ryanmercer 8y ago
  >Presumably as a gladiatorial slave you wouldnt need to worry about abstaining from food choices. It is worth noting that many gladiators, and Olympic competitors, were in fact not slaves and many were actually quite wealthy. Gladiators would do alright purely off of sexual relationships, rather high-class Roman maids and matrons like Hippia actually walked away from her family to be with a gladiator. There are many rumors from the time that allege various sons of powerful people to be bastard offspring of gladiators. There's even tell of some being 'the care and suffering of women' such as one byt he name of Hermes that Martial wrote of. You can tell how wealthy some were simply by looking at the fines issued to them. If you look at charioteers Theogenes and Porphyrius you can see good examples, Theogenes for example was once fined 2 talents for withdrawing from an event (about 250k dollars). If you look at a 2nd century prize table from Aphrodisias you see 500-3000 drachmas and there were several games referred to as 'the 3000-drachma Games', some would see prizes of 6000 drachma and in at least one instance of 30,000 drachma (about 100 years of a solderier's pay) being paid for a single athlete just to appear. At the Panathenaic games the lowest prize was 100 amphrae of olive oil, about 225k$ worth and winners were often fed by their home city for life if they won. Diocles, another charioteer, would compete for prizes up to 60,000 sesterces at a time which would be worth 2.5-3 million dollars today and if you look at his known life time winnings you get 35.8 million sesterces making him a billionaire and then some in today's dollars.
  - warent 8y ago
    Where did you learn all this? I feel like I could have kept reading this post forever. If you have any books to recommend, that would be amazing.
    - ryanmercer 8y ago
      A book titled "Manthropology: The Science of Why the Modern Male Is Not the Man He Used to Be" by Peter McAllister (bahahaha I just realized that's the same name from Home Alone). Everything in the book should be taken as liberal interpretation of history, however that being said he does cite where he gets facts and figures from so you can do your own research of the subjects. Here's a source of the 30k figure https://books.google.com/books?id=QMgsAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA74&lpg=PA74&dq=30,000+drachma+inscription&source=bl&ots=xAAKo4aegQ&sig=vcQu_BUxGqNpnrBeaUVWG8jxTWA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj9q4nPlYTfAhUHvFkKHeB6Cz4Q6AEwBHoECAUQAQ#v=onepage&q=30%2C000%20drachma%20inscription&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=QMgsAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA74&lpg=P... Here's an article that actually puts Diocles worth 15 billion https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7942699/Wealth-of-todays-sports-stars-is-no-match-for-the-fortunes-of-Romes-chariot-racers.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/794...
forkLding 8y ago
I'm thinking its more to do with the fact that meat was expensive and takes much more effort to cook back then, not that they were willing to just eat grains and vegetables, likely grains and vegetables were cheap and much easier to cook. Farmed meat was a luxury in Roman times and game or wild meat was likely also expensive enough to not be eaten every day. We live in different times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Roman_cuisine/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Roman_cuisine/ https://www.historyhit.com/what-did-the-romans-eat-food-and-drink-in-ancient-times/ https://www.historyhit.com/what-did-the-romans-eat-food-and-... https://www.quora.com/What-did-soldiers-eat-in-the-Ancient-Roman-Army https://www.quora.com/What-did-soldiers-eat-in-the-Ancient-R... https://www.thoughtco.com/did-roman-soldiers-eat-meat-120634 https://www.thoughtco.com/did-roman-soldiers-eat-meat-120634
- yuy910616 8y ago
  right that's the first thing I thought of as well. If they had access to big mac they'd be eating that all the time
- rmykhajliw 8y ago
  Totally agree. Meat is expensive, so general fighter can't get one. Another issue meat is perishable product, that's why you just can't really on meat in a war time when supply chain may be broken. It's the same idea was used during Civil War when soldiers main ration was griffins (salty flour crackers) - 2000 years and nothing changed.
tracker1 8y ago
Agreed... given the training regimes, they were probably consuming more than twice the amount of total food of people today. Which likely means they are eating a lot of foods from barley, etc. That doesn't preclude the intake of meat. Beyond that, it's 0.8-1.2g of protein are recommended MINIMUM daily intake to avoid diseases originating from protein deficiencies. At 220# that means 80-120g protein as a minimum. That's a fair amount, and far more than you're likely to get from vegetarian sources at the time alone. There's also a minimum amount of essential fatty acids to consider... at the time it's not like they had canola oil. So there was definitely animal products in their diets. Revisionist theories in order to support a vegetarian agenda are pretty annoying to me. A lot of it doesn't even pass a common sense sniff test. IIRC Barley + Lentils can give you a complete protein profile, and it's possible that maybe 1/3-1/2 of their protein intake was from non-meat sources. But I seriously doubt that even a significant minority were abstaining from meat.
- fouc 8y ago
  80 grams of protein is 320 calories. 220lbs male needs to eat at least 2000 calories (basal metabolic rate), likely closer to 3000-4000 after all the exercise. So protein only constitutes 12% or less of their caloric source. Just about all food have some proportion of protein. Cooked oatmeal is 16% protein by calories.
  - tracker1 8y ago
    I've seen a reference in another quote that suggests 78% if diet from carb sources... that leaves 12% from meat. That is emphatically NOT vegetarian by any modern definition. edit: could include fish, depending on the location.
    - will_brown 8y ago
      Your math is off by 10%. And saying 78% carbs in no way implies the rest is meat. The remaining 22% could be non animal sources of fats and protein. I’ve done vegitarian keto where about 70% of my daily intake is non animal fat, 15-20% non animal protein and 10-15% carbs.
simonsarris 8y ago
Yeah this article is a little too glib in its conclusion. Obviously, 'ate plenty of vegetable matter' !== vegetarian. Then without a discussion of logistics and pricing of specific foods at the time, its odd to try and conclude intention vs necessity, etc. > we should expect that gladiators had a high protein diet. However, analysis of their bones has put forward the hypothesis that gladiators were vegetarian athletes Who says that a mostly vegetarian is low-protein? No mention of specific foods that were eaten in ancient Rome, such as lupines ("lupini beans"), which are low carb high protein and easily dehydrated, transported, etc, and would make an obvious staple for soldiers. As you say, what if the roman soldiers ate mostly lupines + dried fish? And perhaps not because they thought it was ideal for a warrior (though it may be), but simply because they were easy to carry?
Someone 8y ago
”If everyone around them is eating meat” Is that likely? Per calorie, meat is more expensive, and people weren’t that rich, on average, at the time. Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Roman_cuisine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Roman_cuisine states: John E. Stambaugh writes that meat "was scarce except at sacrifices and the dinner parties of the rich." Also, gladiators may have been loading carbs to gain a protective layer of fat. https://archive.archaeology.org/0811/abstracts/gladiator.html https://archive.archaeology.org/0811/abstracts/gladiator.htm...: ”Gladiators, it seems, were fat. Consuming a lot of simple carbohydrates, such as barley, and legumes, like beans, was designed for survival in the arena. Packing in the carbs also packed on the pounds. "Gladiators needed subcutaneous fat," Grossschmidt explains. "A fat cushion protects you from cut wounds and shields nerves and blood vessels in a fight." Not only would a lean gladiator have been dead meat, he would have made for a bad show. Surface wounds "look more spectacular," says Grossschmidt. "If I get wounded but just in the fatty layer, I can fight on," he adds. "It doesn't hurt much, and it looks great for the spectators."”
- SerLava 8y ago
  I'm trying to imagine a gash in my fat gladiator arm that's big enough to see from across the Colosseum and describing it as "doesn't hurt much."
  - kbutler 8y ago
    It's just a flesh wound!
  - Someone 8y ago
    Blood conveniently is an intense red and it can spread over a large area without losing much of its color. A nosebleed, for example, can look quite dramatic. Pain also is highly subjective, and can depend on psychological factors. A gladiator may have thought “that looks as if I fought hard, so they will let me live, and it is survivable”, rather than “that’s half an inch deep, bleeds like , and I will never be able to use that arm again!” Regardless, that gash in your fat arm easily beats an equally sized gash hitting a major artery or cutting into a bone.
1111111111z12 8y ago
> An interesting hypothesis This is not a hypothesis (a speculation to be confirmed or denied), this is a conclusion derived from a series of palaeoethnobotanical and stable isotope analysis studies.

21 8y ago

> The legionnaire's daily ration consisted of 78% carbohydrates, mainly from wheat or barley While calling that "vegetarian" is technically correct, it's not really what people understand by "vegetarian".

1024core 8y ago
What, wheat and barley are not vegetarian?
- umvi 8y ago
  GP's point was: Maximus's diet consists of 78% cereals and grains and 22% meats. Is Maximus a vegetarian?
  - simias 8y ago
    I don't understand, where does it say that the remaining 22% are from meats?
    - sdinsn 8y ago
      It also doesn't say that the remaining 22% aren't from meat.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - 1024core 8y ago
    There are these things called "vegetables" which some people eat. You may have heard of them? And then there's dairy (like milk and cheese). Just because someone's diet is vegetarian, it does not mean that they must exclusively eat wheat or barley.
- sdinsn 8y ago
  > 78%
boyband6666 8y ago

strict9 8y ago

Ethical and environmental debates aside, I chose to be a vegetarian 10 years ago as a way of forcing myself to have diversity in what I consume. It was too easy to fall into the trap of eating junk. Giving up meat doesn't ensure health by any stretch, but it does force you to consider and plan what you eat. It's worked out well for me. aside: dietary preferences aren't an affront to someone else's lifestyle or eating decisions. I don't judge meat eaters, I hope you won't judge those who choose not to.

malikNF 8y ago
I recently started preferring the vegetarian option over the non-veg one. And what you say exactly is the same problem I am facing, having to come up with what to eat. With meat its really easy to come up with what to eat, but whenever I try to think of something vegetarian it gets hard. Do you have any tips for someone starting to switch to a vegetarian diet? Especially when it comes to variety and how I can do this a bit easier?
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  Look at Indian cuisine. They have a ton of vegetarian options.
- warent 8y ago
  > "Whenever I try to think of something vegetarian it gets hard. Do you have any tips for someone starting to switch to a vegetarian diet? Especially when it comes to variety and how I can do this a bit easier?" Having the raw ingredients available is like knowing syntax/functions to a programming language but not having the experience to structure it. There are so many frameworks/libraries/tutorials (recipes) that already exist so you don't have to spend copious amounts of time with trial and error. What I do is I'll sit down and search the web for vegetarian recipes that look good and commit to making them on certain days. Also I never thought I'd be recommending anything Buzzfeed related to anyone, but actually a good source is "Tasty Vegetarian" (https://www.facebook.com/tastyvegetarian/ https://www.facebook.com/tastyvegetarian/) which posts random vegetarian recipes that are really easy to make (I've had really good ones and also some kind of bad ones. If it's bad, usually the comments will be full of people complaining)

msiyer 8y ago

I am not surprised at all. I am from India. Most people I knew in my childhood were vegetarians. I knew a few wrestlers who practiced in the "akhadas" of Varanasi. Big guys, all "Hanuman" devotees, celibates (Brahmacharis) and vegetarians. Sushil Kumar the wrestler, Olympics medal winner, is a vegetarian: https://www.petaindia.com/blog/sushil-kumar/ https://www.petaindia.com/blog/sushil-kumar/ EDIT: People are getting triggered left and right. Man, this is the truth in the East. We were\are mostly vegetarians. Only recently did we start eating western food. Only recently did we see people getting terribly obese and chronically sick.

InGodsName 8y ago
What's surprising? You can get enough protein from milk based products and eggs. One scoop (40g) whey contains 25-30g protein
- msiyer 8y ago
  Eggs are not vegetarian.
  - warent 8y ago
    Eggs are not vegan, but they are vegetarian ("ovo-vegetarian")
    - msiyer 8y ago
      Please read the definitions clearly. How can an animal product be vegetarian? Does it even make sense? Ovo-vegetarianism = eggs + vegetarian food. This is certainly not eggs = vegetarian.
      - warent 8y ago
        I'm just explaining what is actually being communicated in the veg culture (at least in the US). Just about any vegetarian and vegan knows the distinction: vegetarians are known to consume dairy/eggs/honey, vegans do not. If a vegetarian doesn't eat eggs, they will say "I'm a vegetarian, but I don't eat eggs either" So basically when you read "vegetarian" you can safely assume it's shorthand for "ovo-lacto-vegetarian"

empath75 8y ago

Meat was expensive, grain was cheap.

diego 8y ago

> previous reviews of the scientific literature have concluded that a well-planned and varied vegetarian diet can meet the needs of athletes, as it was for Roman gladiators or legionnaires. What does this even mean? "Meet the needs" is relative to a certain quality of life. Even if the gladiators or legionnaires were vegetarian (questionable even with the paper's assumptions), who knows what their quality of life was. Probably not acceptable to our standards.

bryanrasmussen 8y ago

All the time, never any deviation? I understand it was expensive, so they never got a treat for doing good?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

downrightmike 8y ago

A large part of being a soldier was that you had your own land that you could produce enough food to survive and buy equipment go to war. War where you could capture slaves to work your land and and riches to afford more land. The idea of the state providing the means and equipment to send soldiers to war only happened in the later era where men couldn't get land because of the artistocrats owning it all and the state had to outfit them so they could go to war.

z3phyr 8y ago
This is true for The early and middle republic Rome, but after the Marian Reforms, and especially during the Principate, Rome maintained a state sponsored standing army, with standardized arms. Of course after the crisis and eventual fall of Rome, it went back the older way

loourr 8y ago

Bullshit. Maybe they were forced to be a vegetarian when they couldn't get meat. Also, it's not like they had modern vegetarian protein powders and supplements which are most likely being used in their assessment of the modern vegetarian athlete. And it's super flawed reasoning to assume that because they have markers of eating plant-based food, they therefore only ate plant-based food. This just seems like vegetarian propaganda masquerading as science.

cmrdporcupine 8y ago
It's not even new information -- it has been known by historians for decades that most non-elite Romans had no ability to regularly consume meat and they existed on a heavy carbohydrate diet supplemented by seafood when they could get it. It's one of the things remarked on by contemporary Romans about their Germanic and Celtic foes -- that they ate so much meat, that they used 'disgusting' animal fats (lard and butter) instead of olive oils in their cooking. And that they were much taller. Likely because of higher meat and dairy consumption over several generations. The Roman agricultural economy could not support high meat consumption.

alisson 8y ago

A good resume from Nutrition Facts with a few other related papers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2e9sLsCowaE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2e9sLsCowaE

zefe563s 8y ago
Ah yes Michael Greger the plant-based quack M.D https://i.imgur.com/Bl5Kq4w.jpg https://i.imgur.com/Bl5Kq4w.jpg

brahmwg 8y ago

Isn't it more likely they were vegetarians not by choice but because they were essentially slaves, being fed the cheapest food possible (grains, etc)? Though I'm sure many will use this as evidence in favor of vegetarianism... "Yeah but even the mighty gladiators were vegans!" Anecdote storytime; I was actually born and raised into a vegetarian household, and spent the first approx 22 years of my life as a vegetarian. Then I switched to eating meat (really, just chicken and fish, maybe red meat once a year) and for me I feel healthier this way. When eating meat I can just eat less total volume of food to get the same amount of calories and nutrients compared to fueling up on a plant based diet. I love running, hiking and rock climbing, and nothing quite hits the spot like a nice protein rich chicken sandwich after a day in the mountains. YMMV, but for me, for now, I think I will continue with my consumption of animal flesh. I think to pull off the veg diet you have to carefully measure and monitor things, you can't just omit entire food groups from your diet and expect to be healthy. It's very naive but many vegan and vegetarians think this way; As long as the food has that VeganTM label, it must be good, why bother even checking the ingredients? Tldr; ex-vegetarian since birth prefers chicken sandwiches for climber fuel

warent 8y ago
> "It's very naive but many vegan and vegetarians think this way; As long as the food has that VeganTM label, it must be good, why bother even checking the ingredients?" This has not been my experience. The vegetarians and vegans I meet are typically very conscious of what they're putting into their bodies. The evidence is that you can be a great climber (the world's greatest free-solo climber Alex Honnold is a vegetarian.) or a gladiator without meat , and the humans' insatiable meat consumption is ruining the environment even more quickly than oil. But I wish more people who ate meat had your disposition--at least have it in moderation rather than every single kind of meat piled on a plate 3 times a day 7 days a week which is basically the norm and sadly barely hyperbolic.
- brahmwg 8y ago
  You're right, I'm sure there are alot of very health conscious vegetarians who actively monitor their health. Perhaps that's actually more common. My experience has been, perhaps contrarily, that the vegan/vegetarians I've met think that by simply omitting meat they don't need to be concerned about monitoring their health. Since that was my observation and was counter intuitive I thought I'd share.

LoSboccacc 8y ago

The real issue with meat was that it spoils easily on a military campaign and it's hard to be cured on campsites. That's logistic 101, the nutritionist angle is not needed and borderline revisionistic. If you prefer citations instead of logic "The logistic of Roman army at war" by Roth also gives out all the needed information and points to the archeological evidence. The provided food was what could be transported, while the foraged included game and other meats, in moderations because of costs, spoiling, and other.

imgabe 8y ago

> Considering the modern diets of strength athletes, we should expect that gladiators had a high protein diet. Why should we expect that? Gladiators were slaves. I would expect slave owners to feed their slaves as cheaply as possible. What evidence is there that they even considered diet to be a factor in athletic performance and that they would try to maximize nutrition if they did?

spraak 8y ago

Dr. Greger just released a video about this, too -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2e9sLsCowaE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2e9sLsCowaE

nerpderp82 8y ago

Vegetarian diets were easier to transport, so it could be a primarily logistical issue. An Army moves on its stomach. Much of Napoleons speed over land was due to how quickly and stably they could move food due to canning. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/03/01/147751097/why-napoleon-offered-a-prize-for-inventing-canned-food https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/03/01/147751097/why-...

peterwwillis 8y ago

The article says the higher levels of strontium in their bones is from vegetables, but this source[1] says it's from consuming a tonic of plant ashes after their fights. They're trying to then correlate this to vegetarianism, but it's unrelated: they were artificially increasing their strontium-calcium ratio. It's pretty well documented that bread and porridge were the staple foods of the Roman world[2]. You could mix anything into your porridge, from vegetables and dried fruits to expensive things like olive oil, meat and fish. Garum, a fish-based condiment, was put on everything. Their higher carb intake is probably not because they were avoiding meat or protein, but because they just needed more calories, and carbs like grains and beans are a cheap plentiful source of them. There were many different kinds of gladiator from all walks of life, so it's insane to think at least some didn't eat meat. In fact, in the bone studies quoted, at least 2 of the 22 gladiators analyzed showed elevated consumption of meat. If you're a slave gladiator and your owner is a cheap bastard, then your dinner (like the rest of the poor people of Rome) will be mostly carbs. But if you're a well-off gladiator, you probably ate meat when you felt like it. [1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141020090006.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/10/141020090006.h... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Roman_cuisine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Roman_cuisine

Balgair 8y ago
>Garum, a fish-based condiment, was put on everything. Aside: It's always been so interesting to me to learn about the smells, flavors, and real life of people back then. Garum is a perfect example of this. The Romans really did put the stuff on everything. It's not just a fish based condiment, it was a very integral part of Roman food and life. You make it by fermenting fish in salt in the Mediterranean sun for a few months and then go about straining the 'pulp' until it runs clear (there is a LOT more to it than that, but thems the basics). Think something like fish sauce. Modern versions are very savory and deep in flavor; super umami sauce. Such things are, today, very foreign seeming. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLDlUGXJMFY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLDlUGXJMFY https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garum https://www.amazon.com/Nettuno-Colatura-Anchovy-Sauce-Campania/dp/B000CRIFGM https://www.amazon.com/Nettuno-Colatura-Anchovy-Sauce-Campan... (a modern type of Garum)

marshray 8y ago

The reasoning I heard was that since most gladiators were unlikely to make it past the first few fights, why waste expensive food on them? For celebrity gladiators I imagine the calculation was different.