12 ms·

The horrors of Pompeii

138 points by diodorus 3y ago

Towaway69 3y ago
Nice read but nothing particular interesting unless one believes we have made progress in the last 2000 years. Hint: we're still just sex crazy monkeys with a liking to power and control over other monkeys.
- srcthr 3y ago
  And of course as is typical of late stage western cultural elitism there are 4000 words on sex and two for the mines. You'd think the place where slave lifespan was measured in years rather than decades would make for a more interesting story. A man drowning in the dark, trapped by a rock fall, seeing the crushed head of his foreman on the left and his best friend running on the right. But that would mean forcing readers to imagine a life where economics and not perversion were the driving force of history and we can't have that.
  - cafard 3y ago
    "Late stage" or "late capitalism" always suggests to me that the user has inside information on the sell-by date. I don't disagree about the proportion of attention.
    - GolfPopper 3y ago
      I suspect it's a combination of looking around and going "this can't possibly be stable" combined with a degree of wish-fulfillment.
      - nerdponx 3y ago
        It has more to do with the idea that the system has evolved and advanced for a while. It's not so much about the system ending soon, as it is about it being deeply entrenched and widely adopted, its long-term negative consequences having had time to manifest, and/or being the late stages of a deliberate long-term agenda.
        Tronno 3y ago
        That might be reading into it too much. I'm pretty sure it's just a joke that capitalism is cancer. As in, "late-stage cancer".
        nerdponx 3y ago
        Synonymous terms have been used in leftist/Marxist literature for a long time, that's always where I assumed it came from: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/late-capitalism/524943/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/late-ca...
      - c_crank 3y ago
        Is "this" capitalism?
    - ch4s3 3y ago
      It's funny that the phrase was coined in 1902 and fell out of fashion by about 1970 and was revived in the 2010s. I guess what's old is new again.
    - Der_Einzige 3y ago
      It's people who believe Marx's thing about how "boom-bust" cycles will eventually destroy capitalism. Unfortunately, Historical Materialism is utter and complete bullshit.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    Without economics we'd all starve to death. Edit: I submit "Alone", the TV show where survival experts are dumped out in the wilderness one by one, where they all starve and eventually get pulled out for losing dangerous amounts of weight. And this is despite bringing along survival gear made by an advanced economy.
    - bruce511 3y ago
      Not sure why the down-votes, but I will point out they start in late fall, in areas uncolonised by people in 2000 years- which might infer some hint as to the desirability of said location.
      - WalterBright 3y ago
        They were also severely restricted in what technology they could bring. But they still had fish hooks, survival clothing, advanced bow and arrows, an advanced saw or hatchet, fish line, and fire starter. Only one was able to make fire without a fire starter. After watching Alone, I bought myself a fire starter, to carry when hiking. I remember one father/son team. The son had some sort of fisheries degree, and considered himself a fishing expert. Father and son would fish, the father caught fish regularly, the son couldn't catch one. A lot of the fishing experts turned out to be not so good at fishing, the same for the hunting experts. What's kinda sad is how bad most were at building shelters. They'd spend all their calories building a magnificent log cabin, and then were too weak to continue. Season after season they'd do this. Or they'd spend time carving toys. Or they'd burn down their shelter with a bad fireplace or poison themselves with the smoke. The point is, humans have evolved to need an economy for mutual survival. Can't realistically do it alone, from scratch.
        autoexec 3y ago
        > What's kinda sad is how bad most were at building shelters. Seems expected when you consider that most people have never built a shelter, and those that have aren't often doing it on a regular basis using whatever happens to be lying around. Same for fishers and hunters who are highly skilled in the environments they regularly work in. You can only expect them to struggle when placed in new environments with new added restrictions. You'd just hope they'd struggle a bit less than an novice would in that situation.
  - dan-robertson 3y ago
    I’m very confused what your point is? It sounds to me like you either think the topic of this article is so trivial that it shouldn’t have been written or that any article on the time period has to cover everything that happened then. But I don’t really believe either of those could be true. I’m sure an article about the horrors of being a slave in a Roman mine would do fine, it’s just that it probably wouldn’t be able to rely on archaeology in Pompeii, which had little relation to mining. There was an article from a typical ‘western cultural elitism’ outlet that did well here and elsewhere recently about terrible conditions faced by illegal miners in abandoned South African mines, so I really don’t think the reason for the focus is preferences about topic so much as, you know, that you can have different articles about different things.
- elwell 3y ago
  "Those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them—do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.” - Luke 13:4-5
Tronno 3y ago
In case it wasn't immediately clear (it wasn't to me) "2 asses" refers to the as/assarius, a coin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_(Roman_coin) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_(Roman_coin)
- autoexec 3y ago
  Thank you! I really couldn't imagine two donkeys being the price, but even that was easier than trying to workout what the biological explanation would have been.
  - kijin 3y ago
    I dunno, two donkeys actually sounds like a reasonable price for purchasing a sex slave in an ancient city. Now if you only wanted to rent her for half an hour and have a pair of donkeys you don't need in the meantime, hey, I've got an idea. It's like Uber for donkeys, and we're going to build it on the eDonkey network...
injb 3y ago
>>> About a fifth of the women’s names in the brothel indicate they were free. Can anyone explain this?
- robbiep 3y ago
  (Even?) today there are many people involved in the sex industry voluntarily - I know of a Doctor who has left her specialist job to pursue full time sex work, she says it pays more. It’s not so hard to believe that some women 2,000 years ago would have made a good living in a society where this kind of work was accepted and legal. Presumably a portion could have been previously slaves who earned their freedom; and maybe even some who chose it as a line of work as free women initially
  - zirgs 3y ago
    Just because that kind of "work" is legal doesn't mean that it's accepted.
  - injb 3y ago
    Thanks but what I'm asking is how they can tell from their names? Is there a naming convention here?
    - brazzy 3y ago
      There were naming conventions and fashions that changed over the centuries. Most importantly, slaves had only one name, while Roman citizens or freedmen had two or three.
  - thsksbd 3y ago
    I need a clarification: You know a medical doctor who left medicine and is working as a prostitute because it pays more? What country if you don't mind me asking?
- memling 3y ago
  > Can anyone explain this? Slave names were sometimes numbers. Naming conventions in Roman culture were apparently also fairly formal.[0] I would guess there's sufficient evidence here that a ratio of free to slave could be estimated. In general, it seems like being a slave was not a great experience.[1] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome#Treatment_and_daily_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome#Treatm... [1]: among other stories, the one concerning the murder of Lucius Pedanius Secundus sticks in my mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Pedanius_Secundus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Pedanius_Secundus
DoreenMichele 3y ago
Graffiti is one of the most exciting kinds of evidence preserved for us by the destruction of Pompeii, because it comes not from the literature of the elite, or the inscriptions of the powerful, but from a wider cross-section of society. The article is mostly about slavery and prostitution, colored by modern views of the world. For much of human history, people were simply trying to survive and life expectancy was usually lower than today. A lot of privileged people had lives we would not really envy. Articles like this usually make no effort to give that kind of context and implicitly compare their worst to our best or average and make it sound intentionally cruel to a greater degree than was probably the case most of the time.
- User23 3y ago
  > life expectancy was usually lower than today Life expectancy at birth was lower than today. However those who survived to adulthood had a life expectancy considerably closer to modern ones than most people think. It turns out the massive infant and childhood mortality rates greatly dragged down the average overall life expectancy.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    If we forget how war was a common "sport" and how much court decisions were done.
  - DC-3 3y ago
    This is true, but true in the sense of 'actually adults tended to live into their 60s not into their 40s'. In western countries today if someone dies in their 60s it seems very young.
  - hist_thr 3y ago
    No they really didn't. This is what the age pyramid looks like for a first world nation: https://www.populationpyramid.net/finland/2022/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/finland/2022/ It's a column until you reach 70 then people start dying. This is what the age pyramid looks like for a society stuck in the Malthusian trap: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XfdbjKDGvT0/Ti49-5r5EyI/AAAAAAAABVE/KiDAwxps_DY/s1600/medieval_pop_demo.JPG https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XfdbjKDGvT0/Ti49-5r5EyI/AAAAAAAAB... Notice how people have a half life, the chance of dying when you reach 20 years in any year is 5% regardless of age.
schmichael 3y ago
> Petronius was writing comedy, but there is no reason to dispute the incidental details, which can bring the Lupanar to life. His description suggests brothels would be located in more out-of-the-way parts of town and were not necessarily identifiable from the outside; the prostitutes and punters were screened from the outside world by a curtain. It also reveals that people could be enticed or tricked into visiting – presumably chaperones who drummed up trade got a fee. “No reason to dispute”? Surely the most obvious explanation for a scene about recognizing someone in a brothel and both claiming to have been “tricked” is that at least one of them is lying, and poorly at that? It seems just as plausible to me that the brothel was very obviously marked and so the idea that anyone could be tricked into going there unaware would be a hilarious joke. I obviously don’t know either, but I just wish historical articles wouldn’t act so certain about things they offer no proof of!
- iLoveOncall 3y ago
  > I obviously don’t know either, but I just wish historical articles wouldn’t act so certain about things they offer no proof of! I watched a documentary one or two years ago about the coliseum in Rome, and it made me realize that what we claim to know about those ancient times must be 80% bullshit. It was all assumptions built on top of assumptions, themselves built on top of suppositions without any proof. When I was a kid I wanted to become an archeologist, but this one documentary that basically put in evidence that everything is just bullshit where we have picked the most convenient explanation completely disinterested me from archeology forever.
  - twelve40 3y ago
    I wouldn't be so harsh. they are trying to find an explanation for things with little to go on. Besides, they probably don't even fare that much worse than other social sciences in that regard, at least there isn't a ton of motivation for bias for things from 2000 years ago.
- twelve40 3y ago
  I didn't even think about that. You're right, it's really a joke about two dudes who bumped into each other in a brothel and each invented a story how they totally by some strange accident got there )))
Simon_O_Rourke 3y ago
As Edward Gibbon said, "Our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery", however, you can't help but feeling that it must have been particularly awful existence for the many enslaved underclasses of Pompeii.
ChatGTP 3y ago
These show something very basic and timeless that we have in common with ancient Pompeiians – sex Given the low birthrates in many countries around the world, I'm not so sure this is true anymore.
- bazoom42 3y ago
  Dont know if you are serious, but contraception.
  - ChatGTP 3y ago
    I think people are just way more interested in their phones.
mark_l_watson 3y ago
Historian Tom Holland has a good narrative of why the Romans were so different than we are. They believed that the gods favored them, all other cultures were beneath them, and unless women were very wealthy they basically had no rights.

138 points by diodorus 3y ago

Nice read but nothing particular interesting unless one believes we have made progress in the last 2000 years. Hint: we're still just sex crazy monkeys with a liking to power and control over other monkeys.

srcthr 3y ago
And of course as is typical of late stage western cultural elitism there are 4000 words on sex and two for the mines. You'd think the place where slave lifespan was measured in years rather than decades would make for a more interesting story. A man drowning in the dark, trapped by a rock fall, seeing the crushed head of his foreman on the left and his best friend running on the right. But that would mean forcing readers to imagine a life where economics and not perversion were the driving force of history and we can't have that.
- cafard 3y ago
  "Late stage" or "late capitalism" always suggests to me that the user has inside information on the sell-by date. I don't disagree about the proportion of attention.
  - GolfPopper 3y ago
    I suspect it's a combination of looking around and going "this can't possibly be stable" combined with a degree of wish-fulfillment.
    - nerdponx 3y ago
      It has more to do with the idea that the system has evolved and advanced for a while. It's not so much about the system ending soon, as it is about it being deeply entrenched and widely adopted, its long-term negative consequences having had time to manifest, and/or being the late stages of a deliberate long-term agenda.
      - Tronno 3y ago
        That might be reading into it too much. I'm pretty sure it's just a joke that capitalism is cancer. As in, "late-stage cancer".
        nerdponx 3y ago
        Synonymous terms have been used in leftist/Marxist literature for a long time, that's always where I assumed it came from: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/late-capitalism/524943/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/late-ca...
    - c_crank 3y ago
      Is "this" capitalism?
  - ch4s3 3y ago
    It's funny that the phrase was coined in 1902 and fell out of fashion by about 1970 and was revived in the 2010s. I guess what's old is new again.
  - Der_Einzige 3y ago
    It's people who believe Marx's thing about how "boom-bust" cycles will eventually destroy capitalism. Unfortunately, Historical Materialism is utter and complete bullshit.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  Without economics we'd all starve to death. Edit: I submit "Alone", the TV show where survival experts are dumped out in the wilderness one by one, where they all starve and eventually get pulled out for losing dangerous amounts of weight. And this is despite bringing along survival gear made by an advanced economy.
  - bruce511 3y ago
    Not sure why the down-votes, but I will point out they start in late fall, in areas uncolonised by people in 2000 years- which might infer some hint as to the desirability of said location.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      They were also severely restricted in what technology they could bring. But they still had fish hooks, survival clothing, advanced bow and arrows, an advanced saw or hatchet, fish line, and fire starter. Only one was able to make fire without a fire starter. After watching Alone, I bought myself a fire starter, to carry when hiking. I remember one father/son team. The son had some sort of fisheries degree, and considered himself a fishing expert. Father and son would fish, the father caught fish regularly, the son couldn't catch one. A lot of the fishing experts turned out to be not so good at fishing, the same for the hunting experts. What's kinda sad is how bad most were at building shelters. They'd spend all their calories building a magnificent log cabin, and then were too weak to continue. Season after season they'd do this. Or they'd spend time carving toys. Or they'd burn down their shelter with a bad fireplace or poison themselves with the smoke. The point is, humans have evolved to need an economy for mutual survival. Can't realistically do it alone, from scratch.
      - autoexec 3y ago
        > What's kinda sad is how bad most were at building shelters. Seems expected when you consider that most people have never built a shelter, and those that have aren't often doing it on a regular basis using whatever happens to be lying around. Same for fishers and hunters who are highly skilled in the environments they regularly work in. You can only expect them to struggle when placed in new environments with new added restrictions. You'd just hope they'd struggle a bit less than an novice would in that situation.
- dan-robertson 3y ago
  I’m very confused what your point is? It sounds to me like you either think the topic of this article is so trivial that it shouldn’t have been written or that any article on the time period has to cover everything that happened then. But I don’t really believe either of those could be true. I’m sure an article about the horrors of being a slave in a Roman mine would do fine, it’s just that it probably wouldn’t be able to rely on archaeology in Pompeii, which had little relation to mining. There was an article from a typical ‘western cultural elitism’ outlet that did well here and elsewhere recently about terrible conditions faced by illegal miners in abandoned South African mines, so I really don’t think the reason for the focus is preferences about topic so much as, you know, that you can have different articles about different things.
elwell 3y ago
"Those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them—do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.” - Luke 13:4-5

Tronno 3y ago

In case it wasn't immediately clear (it wasn't to me) "2 asses" refers to the as/assarius, a coin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_(Roman_coin) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_(Roman_coin)

autoexec 3y ago
Thank you! I really couldn't imagine two donkeys being the price, but even that was easier than trying to workout what the biological explanation would have been.
- kijin 3y ago
  I dunno, two donkeys actually sounds like a reasonable price for purchasing a sex slave in an ancient city. Now if you only wanted to rent her for half an hour and have a pair of donkeys you don't need in the meantime, hey, I've got an idea. It's like Uber for donkeys, and we're going to build it on the eDonkey network...

injb 3y ago

>>> About a fifth of the women’s names in the brothel indicate they were free. Can anyone explain this?

robbiep 3y ago
(Even?) today there are many people involved in the sex industry voluntarily - I know of a Doctor who has left her specialist job to pursue full time sex work, she says it pays more. It’s not so hard to believe that some women 2,000 years ago would have made a good living in a society where this kind of work was accepted and legal. Presumably a portion could have been previously slaves who earned their freedom; and maybe even some who chose it as a line of work as free women initially
- zirgs 3y ago
  Just because that kind of "work" is legal doesn't mean that it's accepted.
- injb 3y ago
  Thanks but what I'm asking is how they can tell from their names? Is there a naming convention here?
  - brazzy 3y ago
    There were naming conventions and fashions that changed over the centuries. Most importantly, slaves had only one name, while Roman citizens or freedmen had two or three.
- thsksbd 3y ago
  I need a clarification: You know a medical doctor who left medicine and is working as a prostitute because it pays more? What country if you don't mind me asking?
memling 3y ago
> Can anyone explain this? Slave names were sometimes numbers. Naming conventions in Roman culture were apparently also fairly formal.[0] I would guess there's sufficient evidence here that a ratio of free to slave could be estimated. In general, it seems like being a slave was not a great experience.[1] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome#Treatment_and_daily_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome#Treatm... [1]: among other stories, the one concerning the murder of Lucius Pedanius Secundus sticks in my mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Pedanius_Secundus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Pedanius_Secundus

DoreenMichele 3y ago

Graffiti is one of the most exciting kinds of evidence preserved for us by the destruction of Pompeii, because it comes not from the literature of the elite, or the inscriptions of the powerful, but from a wider cross-section of society. The article is mostly about slavery and prostitution, colored by modern views of the world. For much of human history, people were simply trying to survive and life expectancy was usually lower than today. A lot of privileged people had lives we would not really envy. Articles like this usually make no effort to give that kind of context and implicitly compare their worst to our best or average and make it sound intentionally cruel to a greater degree than was probably the case most of the time.

User23 3y ago
> life expectancy was usually lower than today Life expectancy at birth was lower than today. However those who survived to adulthood had a life expectancy considerably closer to modern ones than most people think. It turns out the massive infant and childhood mortality rates greatly dragged down the average overall life expectancy.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  If we forget how war was a common "sport" and how much court decisions were done.
- DC-3 3y ago
  This is true, but true in the sense of 'actually adults tended to live into their 60s not into their 40s'. In western countries today if someone dies in their 60s it seems very young.
- hist_thr 3y ago
  No they really didn't. This is what the age pyramid looks like for a first world nation: https://www.populationpyramid.net/finland/2022/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/finland/2022/ It's a column until you reach 70 then people start dying. This is what the age pyramid looks like for a society stuck in the Malthusian trap: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XfdbjKDGvT0/Ti49-5r5EyI/AAAAAAAABVE/KiDAwxps_DY/s1600/medieval_pop_demo.JPG https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XfdbjKDGvT0/Ti49-5r5EyI/AAAAAAAAB... Notice how people have a half life, the chance of dying when you reach 20 years in any year is 5% regardless of age.

schmichael 3y ago

> Petronius was writing comedy, but there is no reason to dispute the incidental details, which can bring the Lupanar to life. His description suggests brothels would be located in more out-of-the-way parts of town and were not necessarily identifiable from the outside; the prostitutes and punters were screened from the outside world by a curtain. It also reveals that people could be enticed or tricked into visiting – presumably chaperones who drummed up trade got a fee. “No reason to dispute”? Surely the most obvious explanation for a scene about recognizing someone in a brothel and both claiming to have been “tricked” is that at least one of them is lying, and poorly at that? It seems just as plausible to me that the brothel was very obviously marked and so the idea that anyone could be tricked into going there unaware would be a hilarious joke. I obviously don’t know either, but I just wish historical articles wouldn’t act so certain about things they offer no proof of!

iLoveOncall 3y ago
> I obviously don’t know either, but I just wish historical articles wouldn’t act so certain about things they offer no proof of! I watched a documentary one or two years ago about the coliseum in Rome, and it made me realize that what we claim to know about those ancient times must be 80% bullshit. It was all assumptions built on top of assumptions, themselves built on top of suppositions without any proof. When I was a kid I wanted to become an archeologist, but this one documentary that basically put in evidence that everything is just bullshit where we have picked the most convenient explanation completely disinterested me from archeology forever.
- twelve40 3y ago
  I wouldn't be so harsh. they are trying to find an explanation for things with little to go on. Besides, they probably don't even fare that much worse than other social sciences in that regard, at least there isn't a ton of motivation for bias for things from 2000 years ago.
twelve40 3y ago
I didn't even think about that. You're right, it's really a joke about two dudes who bumped into each other in a brothel and each invented a story how they totally by some strange accident got there )))

Simon_O_Rourke 3y ago

As Edward Gibbon said, "Our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery", however, you can't help but feeling that it must have been particularly awful existence for the many enslaved underclasses of Pompeii.

ChatGTP 3y ago

These show something very basic and timeless that we have in common with ancient Pompeiians – sex Given the low birthrates in many countries around the world, I'm not so sure this is true anymore.

bazoom42 3y ago
Dont know if you are serious, but contraception.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  I think people are just way more interested in their phones.

mark_l_watson 3y ago

Historian Tom Holland has a good narrative of why the Romans were so different than we are. They believed that the gods favored them, all other cultures were beneath them, and unless women were very wealthy they basically had no rights.