7 ms·

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

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.
  - Dah00n 3y ago
    Finland though. Try Africa: https://www.populationpyramid.net/africa/2022/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/africa/2022/
    - twelve40 3y ago
      try the world(google), it's actually closer to finland
      - Dah00n 3y ago
        Yes, because much of the world export our slave-like labour to poor regions of the world. Those poor people clearly need to be counted in our life expectancy if we are to compare to a time when slaves where in the household etc. Export of misery does make the numbers look nice though.
    - hist_thr 3y ago
      Africa does not have a 50% child mortality rate. What it has is an an average of 5 children born per woman. In short: not even the worst place in Africa today is as bad as the best place any time before 1900.
  - legulere 3y ago
    A middle age rural village in Germany is not the same as an ancient roman city.
    - qwytw 3y ago
      > middle age rural village in Germany Especially after the plague would have been a much nicer place to live for most people than an average ancient Roman city (or even Rome itself given that's its population was only sustainable because of immigration)
- twelve40 3y ago
  > had a life expectancy considerably closer to modern ones than most people think there are quite a few weasel words in there, but no, they didn't have life expectancy I would envy, even if they survived adulthood.
- n8henrie 3y ago
  I think the detractors of your comment would have less ground if you compared the life expectancy at 10 yo in Pompeii to that of a 10 yo from, say, 100 years ago, in which case at least I find it surprising that the difference is not far greater.
  - truculent 3y ago
    The Middle Ages is not Rome. I think it’s plausible that Roman society would fare better
    - mcpackieh 3y ago
      100 years ago was not the Middle Ages, that ended about 500 years ago. 100 years ago is the late modern period.
      - truculent 3y ago
        I think I replied to the wrong comment. My mistake.
    - qwytw 3y ago
      Why? There is evidence suggesting that the number calories available and the general quality of nutrition for median person increased after the collapse of the Roman empire. Both because of a significant decrease in taxation but mostly because the plague, climate change and warfare killed half or so killed half of the people living in Europe at the time. The same thing happened in the 1300s and 1400s as the number of people decreases significantly the quality of life for those who remained increased (more land per capita). Additionally there were significant technological developments during the middle ages which resulted in higher crop yields (especially in northern Europe) (heavy plow, horse collars, wind mills, more water mills, 3 and later 4 field crop rotation, general improvements in metallurgy...
  - riffraff 3y ago
    100 years ago we had barely started doing vaccinations at scale, germ theory was accepted but basically a "modern" theory and surgery was still barely better than the previous millennia. The 20th and 21st century havd been revolutionary from a medical point of view.
- inglor_cz 3y ago
  "However those who survived to adulthood had a life expectancy considerably closer to modern ones than most people think." Nope. I see this consistently repeated all over HN or Reddit, but it just isn't true. Only the high clergy routinely reached their late 60s, and trying to analyze general mortality from the relatively sparse ancient records that mostly concerned the richest and most important people introduces enormous biases. It is the burial grounds that tell the full story without major biases (there still are biases caused by, say, sailors drowning and their bones not being buried on land - a nontrivial cause of death in a maritime imperium). And the bones of average people indicate that over half didn't live to see their 60th birthday until the 19th century. In some really bad periods (the Dark Ages in Europe), the average buried adult person is in their early forties - a tale of food insecurity and constant raids. Rome, at least, was mostly food secure and had long periods of peace, so celebrating your 50th birthday was very thinkable for a free Roman citizen of non-pauper status. Edit: someone downvoting this. People, just take any paper about an archeological excavation of an old burial ground and the detected age distribution of the skeletons found. People over 60 are untypical, though always present in all periods until well into the industrial revolution. And early Medieval cemeteries skew a lot younger than either Rome at its height, or the Late Middle Ages with their better agriculture and more capable governments.
  - Dah00n 3y ago
    How is this different to today in countries not living the good life because they have exported slavery to other countries? Africa for example seem worse off than what you wrote. Around 1% at 60: https://www.populationpyramid.net/africa/2022/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/africa/2022/ To compare to a time when slaves were near, surely we must add our poor regions, where people work in mines and factories for us, to our life expectancy. Otherwise we are as much comparing Modern Capitalism to feudalism, etc.
    - hist_thr 3y ago
      Now look at population growth. The Roman empires population was largely stagnant between the 1st century AD to the 3rd. Africa's population has increased 10 fold in the same period.
- tlogan 3y ago
  That is just not true. Do you have paper proving that? As far as I know, life expectancy for somebody who reached age of 10 was 36/37. If you include child mortality then life expectancy was in 20s [1][2]. [1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/3184767 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3184767 [2] https://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums-static/digitalegypt/age/roman.html https://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums-static/digitalegypt/age/roman....
- 0xDEF 3y ago
  >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. This is not true and the source of this misconception is a misleading BBC article that only cited sources about the rich privileged elites of ancient Rome and Middle Age England. The vast majority of people in the past had significantly lower life expectancy than the rich elites of their time.
- qwytw 3y ago
  Even for males in the 20 to 30s in pre modern societies the chance of death (ignoring violence etc.) was several times higher than now. For females the risk of death during childhood was about 1% per event. So if you had 8+ children (half of whom died). Divided per 20 years that alone is 5 times or so higher chance to die per year than a 30 year old woman has today (from all causes). > However those who survived to adulthood had a life expectancy considerably closer to modern ones than most IIRC based on the data we have that was only the case in parts Colonial New England where a majority of 20 year olds could expect to reach 60+. But that was a huge exception compared to every other agricultural society that we know of.
lelanthran 3y ago
Yeah, I think they should be comparing the worst of the past with the worst of today. Too many people have not watched "cannibal warlords of Liberia" so they assume that the worst society today is one sexism and racism.
- qwytw 3y ago
  Maybe the median would make more sense? At least the 80-90th percentiles? > cannibal warlords I bet there used be a whole lot more of those (relatively) and in other countries than Liberia in the past too.
danShumway 3y ago
> 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. I don't know that the situations of the people who owned slaves matter all that much to the experiences of the slaves. There are two ways to read this article. One is as a pure imposition of modern views onto the past with the implication that everyone involved should have known better and should have had the perspective and empathy of a modern watcher; the other is as a clarification that, "hey, maybe Rome wasn't always a progressive advanced bastion of civilization that we should emulate, maybe a lot of people (even the privileged of the time) had terrible experiences, and maybe some of the regular glorification of the past that we engage in is misplaced, both materially and morally?" I'm not sure that your comment contradicts that secondary reading. The past was an unpleasant place to live in for everybody. Particularly if you were a slave. It's a good thing that we've started to walk away from it.
- kergonath 3y ago
  > hey, maybe Rome wasn't always a progressive advanced bastion of civilization that we should emulate, maybe a lot of people (even the privileged of the time) had terrible experiences, and maybe some of the regular glorification of the past that we engage in is misplaced, both materially and morally? Isn’t this a straw man, though? Roman art and culture has a very important part in western minds, if only because our culture largely descends from theirs. But I haven’t seen anyone saying that life was better in the Roman Empire, ever. Even the enlightenment philosophers, to which we owe things like the American and French revolution and gave to their institutions a Roman-like patina, were well aware of the imperfection of the Roman systems. They knew about the social wars, the Gracchi and the fall of the Republic. And that was in the 1600s and 1700s.
  - danShumway 3y ago
    > But I haven’t seen anyone saying that life was better in the Roman Empire, ever. I think that many segments of modern society have a tendency to look at history through rose colored glasses and underrate how awful it was for everyone involved, even when it's couched with "but of course you wouldn't want to actually live there." But this is tricky to talk about because it's not a universal tendency and it doesn't hit everyone the same way. Some people have a tendency to look at history through the opposite lens as if the people involved in it weren't human beings at all and were too primitive and desperate to have any relatable emotion. And the existence of those people who treat history like it was just a primitive hell is why you tend to see memes about getting scammed by a brass merchant being so popular, because it feels like a very human everyday experience and it contradicts that opposite narrative. Maybe you haven't ever encountered anyone saying that Rome was the GOAT, I'm not going to say you're wrong about that if that's not your experience. But then I remember seeing people get weird online about criticisms of Sparta. There is a real tendency I see to abstract history in a way that papers over the humanity of the people involved, and I think that pointing out that the people involved were human beings who suffered in human ways that are genuinely horrible (sometimes horrible to such extremes that it is difficult to internalize and empathize with) -- I think that has some value in punching through that instinct in both directions because whether people are glorifying or demonizing history, the thing that unites both of those instincts is the reduction of the people involved to caricatures and actors rather than human beings. But your millage may vary; I don't know what parts of culture you're embedded in or whether you ever find yourself around people who fall into that trap. Maybe you don't. All I can say is that my experience doesn't match yours, and I do run into people who glorify history, and I do run into people who glorify Rome.
pipes 3y ago
What context would excuse slavery? Everyone was at it so it was ok? Under certain circumstances it was ok? I'm wary of critising historical figures for being racist etc ( e.g.they recently renamed the Hume building in Edinburgh because he had some racists views, which is ridiculous). However I don't think it's possible to paint slavery as ok because it was the style at the time.
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  I didn't say anything like that, though I will note we still have the expression wage slave. There was also a practice of indentured servitude which people seem to see as basically slavery but was more like a loan in an era where money per se was hard to get hold of. In the absence of the ability to borrow money to pay a cost you couldn't cover, you signed over your future labor for a set period. It was somewhat common for a time for people to immigrate to the US colonies via indentured servitude as a means to pay their passage -- cover the price of the boat to get here -- because they had no other means to pay it. Similarly, there was an expression of "working off a dead horse" for people who joined the British Navy or similar to pay off a debt. It referred to both paying the debt ("dead horse") and the lousy hard tack they fed you while you had no money for niceties like food you preferred to eat. For that matter, to this day, joining the military is more like being "owned" than it is like "having a job." So the clear bright line on slavery vs not slavery that many people want to imagine exists doesn't actually exist.
- DropInIn 3y ago
  The commonest form of slavery was "survival slavery" wherein one party is desperate and willing to exchange thier freedom for being ensured the basic provisions of life. This was exceptionally common back in the day, with there being the obligation to not leave, and is not really like a job though many of today would confuse it as such because they can't comprehend the concept that getting room and board is not the same as getting paid, especially when that's with the ever present threat of being kicked to the curb or beaten depending on the culture. And in a world where every apple matters, it's not exactly a simple thing to take on an extra mouth, particularly at first when they're usually weak and unable to do much, thus why the enslaved is made to work so hard. This naturally progresses into abusive systemic norms which weve seen develop in so many societies in history, but really it appears to me they almost all seem to start in a "survival slavery" format.

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.
- Dah00n 3y ago
  Finland though. Try Africa: https://www.populationpyramid.net/africa/2022/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/africa/2022/
  - twelve40 3y ago
    try the world(google), it's actually closer to finland
    - Dah00n 3y ago
      Yes, because much of the world export our slave-like labour to poor regions of the world. Those poor people clearly need to be counted in our life expectancy if we are to compare to a time when slaves where in the household etc. Export of misery does make the numbers look nice though.
  - hist_thr 3y ago
    Africa does not have a 50% child mortality rate. What it has is an an average of 5 children born per woman. In short: not even the worst place in Africa today is as bad as the best place any time before 1900.
- legulere 3y ago
  A middle age rural village in Germany is not the same as an ancient roman city.
  - qwytw 3y ago
    > middle age rural village in Germany Especially after the plague would have been a much nicer place to live for most people than an average ancient Roman city (or even Rome itself given that's its population was only sustainable because of immigration)
twelve40 3y ago
> had a life expectancy considerably closer to modern ones than most people think there are quite a few weasel words in there, but no, they didn't have life expectancy I would envy, even if they survived adulthood.
n8henrie 3y ago
I think the detractors of your comment would have less ground if you compared the life expectancy at 10 yo in Pompeii to that of a 10 yo from, say, 100 years ago, in which case at least I find it surprising that the difference is not far greater.
- truculent 3y ago
  The Middle Ages is not Rome. I think it’s plausible that Roman society would fare better
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    100 years ago was not the Middle Ages, that ended about 500 years ago. 100 years ago is the late modern period.
    - truculent 3y ago
      I think I replied to the wrong comment. My mistake.
  - qwytw 3y ago
    Why? There is evidence suggesting that the number calories available and the general quality of nutrition for median person increased after the collapse of the Roman empire. Both because of a significant decrease in taxation but mostly because the plague, climate change and warfare killed half or so killed half of the people living in Europe at the time. The same thing happened in the 1300s and 1400s as the number of people decreases significantly the quality of life for those who remained increased (more land per capita). Additionally there were significant technological developments during the middle ages which resulted in higher crop yields (especially in northern Europe) (heavy plow, horse collars, wind mills, more water mills, 3 and later 4 field crop rotation, general improvements in metallurgy...
- riffraff 3y ago
  100 years ago we had barely started doing vaccinations at scale, germ theory was accepted but basically a "modern" theory and surgery was still barely better than the previous millennia. The 20th and 21st century havd been revolutionary from a medical point of view.
inglor_cz 3y ago
"However those who survived to adulthood had a life expectancy considerably closer to modern ones than most people think." Nope. I see this consistently repeated all over HN or Reddit, but it just isn't true. Only the high clergy routinely reached their late 60s, and trying to analyze general mortality from the relatively sparse ancient records that mostly concerned the richest and most important people introduces enormous biases. It is the burial grounds that tell the full story without major biases (there still are biases caused by, say, sailors drowning and their bones not being buried on land - a nontrivial cause of death in a maritime imperium). And the bones of average people indicate that over half didn't live to see their 60th birthday until the 19th century. In some really bad periods (the Dark Ages in Europe), the average buried adult person is in their early forties - a tale of food insecurity and constant raids. Rome, at least, was mostly food secure and had long periods of peace, so celebrating your 50th birthday was very thinkable for a free Roman citizen of non-pauper status. Edit: someone downvoting this. People, just take any paper about an archeological excavation of an old burial ground and the detected age distribution of the skeletons found. People over 60 are untypical, though always present in all periods until well into the industrial revolution. And early Medieval cemeteries skew a lot younger than either Rome at its height, or the Late Middle Ages with their better agriculture and more capable governments.
- Dah00n 3y ago
  How is this different to today in countries not living the good life because they have exported slavery to other countries? Africa for example seem worse off than what you wrote. Around 1% at 60: https://www.populationpyramid.net/africa/2022/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/africa/2022/ To compare to a time when slaves were near, surely we must add our poor regions, where people work in mines and factories for us, to our life expectancy. Otherwise we are as much comparing Modern Capitalism to feudalism, etc.
  - hist_thr 3y ago
    Now look at population growth. The Roman empires population was largely stagnant between the 1st century AD to the 3rd. Africa's population has increased 10 fold in the same period.
tlogan 3y ago
That is just not true. Do you have paper proving that? As far as I know, life expectancy for somebody who reached age of 10 was 36/37. If you include child mortality then life expectancy was in 20s [1][2]. [1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/3184767 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3184767 [2] https://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums-static/digitalegypt/age/roman.html https://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums-static/digitalegypt/age/roman....
0xDEF 3y ago
>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. This is not true and the source of this misconception is a misleading BBC article that only cited sources about the rich privileged elites of ancient Rome and Middle Age England. The vast majority of people in the past had significantly lower life expectancy than the rich elites of their time.
qwytw 3y ago
Even for males in the 20 to 30s in pre modern societies the chance of death (ignoring violence etc.) was several times higher than now. For females the risk of death during childhood was about 1% per event. So if you had 8+ children (half of whom died). Divided per 20 years that alone is 5 times or so higher chance to die per year than a 30 year old woman has today (from all causes). > However those who survived to adulthood had a life expectancy considerably closer to modern ones than most IIRC based on the data we have that was only the case in parts Colonial New England where a majority of 20 year olds could expect to reach 60+. But that was a huge exception compared to every other agricultural society that we know of.

lelanthran 3y ago

Yeah, I think they should be comparing the worst of the past with the worst of today. Too many people have not watched "cannibal warlords of Liberia" so they assume that the worst society today is one sexism and racism.

qwytw 3y ago
Maybe the median would make more sense? At least the 80-90th percentiles? > cannibal warlords I bet there used be a whole lot more of those (relatively) and in other countries than Liberia in the past too.

danShumway 3y ago

> 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. I don't know that the situations of the people who owned slaves matter all that much to the experiences of the slaves. There are two ways to read this article. One is as a pure imposition of modern views onto the past with the implication that everyone involved should have known better and should have had the perspective and empathy of a modern watcher; the other is as a clarification that, "hey, maybe Rome wasn't always a progressive advanced bastion of civilization that we should emulate, maybe a lot of people (even the privileged of the time) had terrible experiences, and maybe some of the regular glorification of the past that we engage in is misplaced, both materially and morally?" I'm not sure that your comment contradicts that secondary reading. The past was an unpleasant place to live in for everybody. Particularly if you were a slave. It's a good thing that we've started to walk away from it.

kergonath 3y ago
> hey, maybe Rome wasn't always a progressive advanced bastion of civilization that we should emulate, maybe a lot of people (even the privileged of the time) had terrible experiences, and maybe some of the regular glorification of the past that we engage in is misplaced, both materially and morally? Isn’t this a straw man, though? Roman art and culture has a very important part in western minds, if only because our culture largely descends from theirs. But I haven’t seen anyone saying that life was better in the Roman Empire, ever. Even the enlightenment philosophers, to which we owe things like the American and French revolution and gave to their institutions a Roman-like patina, were well aware of the imperfection of the Roman systems. They knew about the social wars, the Gracchi and the fall of the Republic. And that was in the 1600s and 1700s.
- danShumway 3y ago
  > But I haven’t seen anyone saying that life was better in the Roman Empire, ever. I think that many segments of modern society have a tendency to look at history through rose colored glasses and underrate how awful it was for everyone involved, even when it's couched with "but of course you wouldn't want to actually live there." But this is tricky to talk about because it's not a universal tendency and it doesn't hit everyone the same way. Some people have a tendency to look at history through the opposite lens as if the people involved in it weren't human beings at all and were too primitive and desperate to have any relatable emotion. And the existence of those people who treat history like it was just a primitive hell is why you tend to see memes about getting scammed by a brass merchant being so popular, because it feels like a very human everyday experience and it contradicts that opposite narrative. Maybe you haven't ever encountered anyone saying that Rome was the GOAT, I'm not going to say you're wrong about that if that's not your experience. But then I remember seeing people get weird online about criticisms of Sparta. There is a real tendency I see to abstract history in a way that papers over the humanity of the people involved, and I think that pointing out that the people involved were human beings who suffered in human ways that are genuinely horrible (sometimes horrible to such extremes that it is difficult to internalize and empathize with) -- I think that has some value in punching through that instinct in both directions because whether people are glorifying or demonizing history, the thing that unites both of those instincts is the reduction of the people involved to caricatures and actors rather than human beings. But your millage may vary; I don't know what parts of culture you're embedded in or whether you ever find yourself around people who fall into that trap. Maybe you don't. All I can say is that my experience doesn't match yours, and I do run into people who glorify history, and I do run into people who glorify Rome.

pipes 3y ago

What context would excuse slavery? Everyone was at it so it was ok? Under certain circumstances it was ok? I'm wary of critising historical figures for being racist etc ( e.g.they recently renamed the Hume building in Edinburgh because he had some racists views, which is ridiculous). However I don't think it's possible to paint slavery as ok because it was the style at the time.

DoreenMichele 3y ago
I didn't say anything like that, though I will note we still have the expression wage slave. There was also a practice of indentured servitude which people seem to see as basically slavery but was more like a loan in an era where money per se was hard to get hold of. In the absence of the ability to borrow money to pay a cost you couldn't cover, you signed over your future labor for a set period. It was somewhat common for a time for people to immigrate to the US colonies via indentured servitude as a means to pay their passage -- cover the price of the boat to get here -- because they had no other means to pay it. Similarly, there was an expression of "working off a dead horse" for people who joined the British Navy or similar to pay off a debt. It referred to both paying the debt ("dead horse") and the lousy hard tack they fed you while you had no money for niceties like food you preferred to eat. For that matter, to this day, joining the military is more like being "owned" than it is like "having a job." So the clear bright line on slavery vs not slavery that many people want to imagine exists doesn't actually exist.
DropInIn 3y ago
The commonest form of slavery was "survival slavery" wherein one party is desperate and willing to exchange thier freedom for being ensured the basic provisions of life. This was exceptionally common back in the day, with there being the obligation to not leave, and is not really like a job though many of today would confuse it as such because they can't comprehend the concept that getting room and board is not the same as getting paid, especially when that's with the ever present threat of being kicked to the curb or beaten depending on the culture. And in a world where every apple matters, it's not exactly a simple thing to take on an extra mouth, particularly at first when they're usually weak and unable to do much, thus why the enslaved is made to work so hard. This naturally progresses into abusive systemic norms which weve seen develop in so many societies in history, but really it appears to me they almost all seem to start in a "survival slavery" format.