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Many Roman emperors moonlighted into other interests during their lives. emperor Domitian, son of the emperor Vespasian, for example, wrote what is considered t
by southernplaces7 4y ago
Many Roman emperors moonlighted into other interests during their lives. emperor Domitian, son of the emperor Vespasian, for example, wrote what is considered to be one of the world's first known books on hair care for balding men, as a balding man himself who was quite sensitive about his look.
Also, it was a largely agrarian society, so even an emperor could have had a few turns at managing fields at some point in their life.
When Diocletian, the first of the "Dominate" era emperors, voluntarily left power (the only emperor ever to do so), he returned to his palatial fortress on the Croatian coast to pursue gardening and especially cabbage farming.
At one point after his retirement, a group of senators from Rome was dispatched to visit him and convince him to go back into the purple due to the collapse of the tetrarchic system he'd set up for Imperial administration.
While the senators argued with him, Diocletian famously brought them to his garden and pulled out one of his own cabbages. He then asked the senators how they could expect him to possibly come back to the stresses of Rome when he had managed to raise such beautiful cabbages in the peace of his new home.
- saalweachter 4y agoAlso, there was no Netflix back then, and, like, four books to read. What else were you going to do?
- UncleEntity 4y agoConquer and pillage?
- southernplaces7 4y agoJoke aside, to wealthy and powerful Romans of the time, many thousands, maybe tens of thousands of books and tracts would have been available, possibly even to middle class people. There were even publishing industries and trends akin to reduced versions of today's best seller phenomenon. Someone like Diocletian, Vespasian or his son Domitian wouldn't have had much trouble with interesting literature.
- saalweachter 4y agoTrue enough, although most of those tracts would be dreadfully short by modern standards; the Aeneid waa around 130k words -- compared to 80k for the first Harry Potter and 485k for the fourth Stormlight Archive -- and the 8 books of Caesar's Gallic Wars were 5-15k words a pop. Assuming ancient readers were as proficient as modern ones, "reading every book available" was a reasonable ambition back then, and you were almost certainly limited by money and availability more than time.