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That Roman source is Pliny the Elder, one of the earliest scientific historians and author of the world's oldest surviving encyclopedia. Much of what he wrote h

by chongli 11mo ago

That Roman source is Pliny the Elder, one of the earliest scientific historians and author of the world's oldest surviving encyclopedia. Much of what he wrote has been confirmed through archaeological evidence. The fact that we haven't been able to find physical evidence to back his claim about salt (which may simply have been common knowledge at the time) is no reason to doubt him as a historian. It's also important to note that prior to the invention of refrigeration, salt was vital as a preservative for meats. Soldiers on the march were perfectly capable of hunting any game they came across but the meat would spoil if they had no salt to preserve it. Giving every soldier a regular salt ration (a form of payment) is an extremely easy way to help them feed themselves.

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hollerith 11mo ago
You are not making much of a case. For one thing, I severely doubt wild game would have been plentiful enough to meet more than a very small fraction of the nutritional needs of a Roman army. There is not enough wild game in the US for example to feed more than a quite small fraction of the survivors of a nuclear war according to a calculation I saw -- and the survivors in that scenario have the luxury of remaining spread out over the countryside and of ranging around without incurring the risk of running into a superior number of enemy soldiers.
- chongli 11mo ago
  We're talking about soldiers stalking the wilderness of Pliny the Elder's past, not the present-day United States where game populations have declined dramatically. Furthermore, the population figures are way out of whack as well. The city of Rome in early imperial times was at best half a million people. Pliny the Elder's hometown of Como in northern Italy might have housed up to 10,000. An army drawn from that city would have been a few thousand soldiers at maximum. Armies in ancient times did NOT have the highly sophisticated logistics networks that we have in the modern day. Subsisting on hunting and gathering was a major part of the soldier's life [1]. [1] https://acoup.blog/2022/07/29/collections-logistics-how-did-they-do-it-part-ii-foraging/ https://acoup.blog/2022/07/29/collections-logistics-how-did-...
  - hollerith 11mo ago
    2000 years ago in the regions where the Roman army operated, animal husbandry was already an established way of life for 5000 years or even (in some spots like Asia Minor) a lot longer than that, and the overwhelming majority of the mammalian biomass was in the form of domesticated animals, not wildlife. The land that was not under cultivation was either quite hilly or had something wrong with it that make it bad for supporting wildlife just like it was bad for supporting agriculture. The page you linked does not mention "hunt" except in 2 of the comments (and one comment is about hunting enemy soldiers). Do you claim that the other comment that mentions "hunt" supports your position? If not, please quote the passage on the page that supports your position.
    - chongli 11mo ago
      Foraging for soldiers included plundering and pillaging the local population. They could also just have easily hunted the local villagers' livestock as a source of meat which they could then salt and preserve for food on the march. The article I listed explained in detail how Roman soldiers carried out the full process of turning grain into flour and then baking bread in their encampments. You don't think they could have managed the slaughtering of livestock? But besides that, there were plenty of forests around (which they used to gather firewood, as mentioned in the article). Those forests absolutely would have contained deer and other game they could hunt and preserve.
      - hollerith 11mo ago
        In a previous comment, you wrote about Roman soldiers "hunting any game they came across". "Game" means wild animals. Of course they stole and ate any livestock they could get unless they were passing through the territory of an ally, in which case the commander probably has warned the men that any man caught pillaging would be executed, but in compensation, the commander had probably purchased livestock and other food from the ally to be distributed to the men.
        chongli 11mo ago
hearsathought 11mo ago
> That Roman source is Pliny the Elder, one of the earliest scientific historians and author of the world's oldest surviving encyclopedia. Pliny was not "scientific" nor a "historian" in the modern sense of those words. He didn't write an encyclopedia as we understand it to mean today. > Much of what he wrote has been confirmed through archaeological evidence. Define "much". > The fact that we haven't been able to find physical evidence to back his claim about salt (which may simply have been common knowledge at the time) is no reason to doubt him as a historian. It's no reason to doubt him? It's every reason to doubt him. > Giving every soldier a regular salt ration (a form of payment) is an extremely easy way to help them feed themselves. Or romans could pay the soldiers with roman coins/currency? Of which we have ample evidence all over the roman empire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_currency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_currency No evidence of salt currency. Tons of evidence of roman money. And yet you choose to believe the one without any evidence. Let me guess, you believe in monopods like pliny "the scientific historian" did? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopod_(creature) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopod_(creature) Lets say you have 10000 soldiers. Is it easier to pay them each with a pound of salt or a coin weighing an ounce?
thaumasiotes 11mo ago
This is... a shockingly credulous take. Try not to be like this if your opinion ever matters. Here's Pliny the Elder in full, Loeb translation (I'm including quite a bit more surrounding context than is relevant, just to make clear that this is everything relevant): Moreover sheep, cattle, and draft animals are encouraged to pasture in particular by salt; the supply of milk is much more copious, and there is even a far more pleasing quality in the cheese. Therefore, Heaven knows, a civilized life is impossible without salt, and so necessary is this basic substance that its name is applied metaphorically even to intense mental pleasures. We call them sales (wit); all the humour of life, its supreme joyousness, and relaxation after toil, are expressed by this word more than by any other. It has a place in magistracies also and on service abroad, from which comes the term "salary" (salt money); it had great importance among the men of old, as is clear from the name of the Salarian Way, since by it, according to agreement, salt was imported to the Sabines. King Ancus Marcius gave a largess to the people of 6,000 bushels of salt... https://www.loebclassics.com/view/pliny_elder-natural_history/1938/pb_LCL418.433.xml?readMode=recto https://www.loebclassics.com/view/pliny_elder-natural_histor... It's worth noting here that the glosses, "(wit)" and "(salt money)", are interpolations by the translator; Pliny doesn't gloss salarium at all. We can trace the gloss "salt money" for salarium all the way back to... the 1700s. And we should probably note that there it's conceived of as money that the soldier could use to buy salt, not as money that is made of salt. So, there is no source relating the word "salary" to the concept of being paid in salt. There is a source relating the word "salary" to the concept of salt, and, if you really want to read into it, to the concept of Roman foreign service. But there are many more problems with your comment. Pliny's authority as a historian has no relevance to this question. You'd want the opinion of a philologist, and you'd want it to be supported by something, which as you can see Pliny doesn't do. > his claim about salt (which may simply have been common knowledge at the time) is no reason to doubt him as a historian. And here you show an amazing ignorance of how reliable common knowledge of the origin of words is. The norm is that it's made up out of whole cloth. You can find gamers right now explaining that "meta" developed from the expression "most effective tactics available" or feminists explaining that "mankind" developed from a sexist preference for males over females. Neither idea has anything to do with reality.
- deleted 11mo ago
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by chongli 11mo ago

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

hollerith 11mo ago

You are not making much of a case. For one thing, I severely doubt wild game would have been plentiful enough to meet more than a very small fraction of the nutritional needs of a Roman army. There is not enough wild game in the US for example to feed more than a quite small fraction of the survivors of a nuclear war according to a calculation I saw -- and the survivors in that scenario have the luxury of remaining spread out over the countryside and of ranging around without incurring the risk of running into a superior number of enemy soldiers.

chongli 11mo ago
We're talking about soldiers stalking the wilderness of Pliny the Elder's past, not the present-day United States where game populations have declined dramatically. Furthermore, the population figures are way out of whack as well. The city of Rome in early imperial times was at best half a million people. Pliny the Elder's hometown of Como in northern Italy might have housed up to 10,000. An army drawn from that city would have been a few thousand soldiers at maximum. Armies in ancient times did NOT have the highly sophisticated logistics networks that we have in the modern day. Subsisting on hunting and gathering was a major part of the soldier's life [1]. [1] https://acoup.blog/2022/07/29/collections-logistics-how-did-they-do-it-part-ii-foraging/ https://acoup.blog/2022/07/29/collections-logistics-how-did-...
- hollerith 11mo ago
  2000 years ago in the regions where the Roman army operated, animal husbandry was already an established way of life for 5000 years or even (in some spots like Asia Minor) a lot longer than that, and the overwhelming majority of the mammalian biomass was in the form of domesticated animals, not wildlife. The land that was not under cultivation was either quite hilly or had something wrong with it that make it bad for supporting wildlife just like it was bad for supporting agriculture. The page you linked does not mention "hunt" except in 2 of the comments (and one comment is about hunting enemy soldiers). Do you claim that the other comment that mentions "hunt" supports your position? If not, please quote the passage on the page that supports your position.
  - chongli 11mo ago
    Foraging for soldiers included plundering and pillaging the local population. They could also just have easily hunted the local villagers' livestock as a source of meat which they could then salt and preserve for food on the march. The article I listed explained in detail how Roman soldiers carried out the full process of turning grain into flour and then baking bread in their encampments. You don't think they could have managed the slaughtering of livestock? But besides that, there were plenty of forests around (which they used to gather firewood, as mentioned in the article). Those forests absolutely would have contained deer and other game they could hunt and preserve.
    - hollerith 11mo ago
      In a previous comment, you wrote about Roman soldiers "hunting any game they came across". "Game" means wild animals. Of course they stole and ate any livestock they could get unless they were passing through the territory of an ally, in which case the commander probably has warned the men that any man caught pillaging would be executed, but in compensation, the commander had probably purchased livestock and other food from the ally to be distributed to the men.
      - chongli 11mo ago

hearsathought 11mo ago

> That Roman source is Pliny the Elder, one of the earliest scientific historians and author of the world's oldest surviving encyclopedia. Pliny was not "scientific" nor a "historian" in the modern sense of those words. He didn't write an encyclopedia as we understand it to mean today. > Much of what he wrote has been confirmed through archaeological evidence. Define "much". > The fact that we haven't been able to find physical evidence to back his claim about salt (which may simply have been common knowledge at the time) is no reason to doubt him as a historian. It's no reason to doubt him? It's every reason to doubt him. > Giving every soldier a regular salt ration (a form of payment) is an extremely easy way to help them feed themselves. Or romans could pay the soldiers with roman coins/currency? Of which we have ample evidence all over the roman empire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_currency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_currency No evidence of salt currency. Tons of evidence of roman money. And yet you choose to believe the one without any evidence. Let me guess, you believe in monopods like pliny "the scientific historian" did? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopod_(creature) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopod_(creature) Lets say you have 10000 soldiers. Is it easier to pay them each with a pound of salt or a coin weighing an ounce?

thaumasiotes 11mo ago

This is... a shockingly credulous take. Try not to be like this if your opinion ever matters. Here's Pliny the Elder in full, Loeb translation (I'm including quite a bit more surrounding context than is relevant, just to make clear that this is everything relevant): Moreover sheep, cattle, and draft animals are encouraged to pasture in particular by salt; the supply of milk is much more copious, and there is even a far more pleasing quality in the cheese. Therefore, Heaven knows, a civilized life is impossible without salt, and so necessary is this basic substance that its name is applied metaphorically even to intense mental pleasures. We call them sales (wit); all the humour of life, its supreme joyousness, and relaxation after toil, are expressed by this word more than by any other. It has a place in magistracies also and on service abroad, from which comes the term "salary" (salt money); it had great importance among the men of old, as is clear from the name of the Salarian Way, since by it, according to agreement, salt was imported to the Sabines. King Ancus Marcius gave a largess to the people of 6,000 bushels of salt... https://www.loebclassics.com/view/pliny_elder-natural_history/1938/pb_LCL418.433.xml?readMode=recto https://www.loebclassics.com/view/pliny_elder-natural_histor... It's worth noting here that the glosses, "(wit)" and "(salt money)", are interpolations by the translator; Pliny doesn't gloss salarium at all. We can trace the gloss "salt money" for salarium all the way back to... the 1700s. And we should probably note that there it's conceived of as money that the soldier could use to buy salt, not as money that is made of salt. So, there is no source relating the word "salary" to the concept of being paid in salt. There is a source relating the word "salary" to the concept of salt, and, if you really want to read into it, to the concept of Roman foreign service. But there are many more problems with your comment. Pliny's authority as a historian has no relevance to this question. You'd want the opinion of a philologist, and you'd want it to be supported by something, which as you can see Pliny doesn't do. > his claim about salt (which may simply have been common knowledge at the time) is no reason to doubt him as a historian. And here you show an amazing ignorance of how reliable common knowledge of the origin of words is. The norm is that it's made up out of whole cloth. You can find gamers right now explaining that "meta" developed from the expression "most effective tactics available" or feminists explaining that "mankind" developed from a sexist preference for males over females. Neither idea has anything to do with reality.

deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]