this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2024
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Rough Roman Memes

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A place to meme about the glorious ROMAN EMPIRE (and Roman Republic, and Roman Kingdom)! Byzantines tolerated! The HRE is not.

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Crucify that barbarian dog! (lemmy.world)
submitted 6 months ago by PugJesus to c/roughromanmemes
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[–] TrousersMcPants 14 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

What was the greatest empire?

Edit: looked it up myself, on Wikipedia they list the Great British Empire as largest by land area at 35.5 million km^2, followed by the Mongol empire and the Russian Empire respectively. You have to scroll a loooong way to get to the Roman Empire.

However, when you go by share of the human population, the British Empire ranks much much lower at 23%. The Qing Dynasty tops that chart at 37% followed by the Song then the Western Han Dynasties. By this metric, the Roman Empire comes in 5th with 30% of the world population in 150 CE.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_empires

[–] PugJesus 8 points 6 months ago

It's a barbarian, so its opinion doesn't matter.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

The extent of largest empire goes up over time, which makes sense given that we started with no persistent large states at all. Those are all much later than Rome, so it's not really a fair comparison. Bigger than it and earlier, you have the Achaemenid Persians, Alexander the Great, the Han dynasties, and apparently the Xiongnu which may have just been an earlier iteration of the Hun empire. (The Mongol empire characteristically knocked it out of the park, of course, remaining the biggest until the late 19th century, although TBF it was pretty low density)

Looking at the population list, it's just in competition with Han, which is allowed because that's basically the Pacific version of Rome. The Roman Empire was built around ~~an enclosed sea~~ a Latin lake so it's not super surprising it would be lean on dry landmass. After they go nobody comes close by population share for most of a millennia.

Another good proxy is the largest city. Rome was definitely the biggest throughout the Empire period. After that China takes the lead again, with occasional breaks for Muslims in various places, including Merv which I hadn't even heard of before I read this article for the first time.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

The Romans did actually crucify dogs. When the Gauls attacked Rome, domesticated geese raised the alarm, but dogs didn't. From then on, there was an annual event when dogs were crucified and geese were celebrated.

[–] PugJesus 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Some sources say being suspended from a furca which, while less excruciating, was considered a more degrading and humiliating punishment.

Which would make more sense, considering you want the dogs to be alive to be ritually sacrificed at the end.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

What's the difference, exactly? Wikipedia makes them sound the same.

That's horrifying. Blood sacrifice is one thing, but ritual torture is another level of fucked up.

[–] PugJesus 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

In a crucifixion, you're nailed to it. Suspended from a furca, you're dangled from it. Crucifixion can be slow and painful, but it can also be quick and painful - the Jewish-Roman scholar Josephus notes that he requested the Roman general Titus remove several people from crucifixion very shortly after they were crucified, and even with Titus's own personal physician assisting, the men removed from the cross still died. Getting nailed shoved through your bits is very traumatic, and often deadly even on its own.

Suspended from a furca, you're tied to it. It's generally not lethal in and of itself - but like stocks, it's a humiliation. Traditionally, those hung from the furca were hung there so they could be scourged, though I don't know if the dogs were scourged or just dangled there as the crowds harassed them. The sources all say they were killed/sacrificed at the end, but not in what manner.

But yes, the past is not a pretty place.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Interesting. I had heard the archeological evidence was that the ropes kind was much more common, what with nails being expensive and all. What was the story with Titus? My searches all just turn up Christian apologetics, lol.

[–] PugJesus 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Oh, the Romans had no shortage of nails. Iron production in the Roman Empire wouldn't be matched in Europe for another ~1600 years.

Titus, as in the Emperor Titus (though he wasn't Emperor at the time), commanded Roman forces in Iudea after his father, Vespasian, left. Titus was renowned for being something of a soft-heart - at least by Roman standards.

And when I was sent by Titus Caesar with Cerealins, and a thousand horsemen, to a certain village called Thecoa, in order to know whether it were a place fit for a camp, as I came back, I saw many captives crucified, and remembered three of them as my former acquaintance. I was very sorry at this in my mind, and went with tears in my eyes to Titus, and told him of them; so he immediately commanded them to be taken down, and to have the greatest care taken of them, in order to their recovery; yet two of them died under the physician's hands, while the third recovered.

The Life of Josephus

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Oh, the Romans had no shortage of nails.

Jesus Christ. that looks like tens of tons of iron, and it was a lot pricier before modern technology. You can pump out nails pretty fast by hand once you have the material, but smelting and purifying ferrous metal without actually melting it is very labour-intensive, and the mining itself would have been painfully slow if they had to actually take down rock faces with no power tools or explosives (I don't know how much of their needs could have been met with bog iron and similar).

[–] PugJesus 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Annual production of iron in the Empire was something to the tune of 80,000 tons per year. Roman furnaces were not, to my knowledge, uniform or exceptionally effective, but Roman mining was refined to a science.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The period actually shows up as a carbon spike in ice cores IIRC.

80,000 tons per year

So that's a bit over 1 kg/person, assuming metric tons. I wonder what percentage employment in the industry it took to achieve that.

What do you know about the mining? The whole vinegar splashing thing is documented and continues to confuse us. Do I remember something about donkey-powered pumps and mine carts?

[–] PugJesus 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

So that’s a bit over 1 kg/person, assuming metric tons. I wonder what percentage employment in the industry it took to achieve that.

Not sure, but there are a few employment contracts preserved for common miners, and they get a pretty nice deal for just being unskilled labor, so there was probably a lot of demand compared to the labor force that was available/willing. Also why slaves were condemned to the mines. They always needed more hands.

https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1799&context=open_access_etds

What do you know about the mining? The whole vinegar splashing thing is documented and continues to confuse us. Do I remember something about donkey-powered pumps and mine carts?

I don't think there were mine carts, at least not in the sense of tracked carts. That's a 16th century invention, I think. Pumps, though, definitely - Archimedes Screw was widely used, as was diverting water to erode the ground around metal veins, and trip hammers to smash the ore.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

To be clear, mining it is just the start. I'm no history major but I know a lot about metalworking. I would probably have guessed a quarter of the figure you gave because of that.

Their furnaces could only get so hot, and even if they managed to melt the iron it would dissolve large amounts of carbon from the fuel, becoming pig iron. Much later (19th century) Henry Bessemer invented a way to turn useless pig iron back into steel, but they couldn't, and without knowledge of the the elements involved had no reason to think it was even possible.

Instead, they would expose a batch of ore to a hot, reducing atmosphere while keeping it solid. Besides being highly fuel inefficient and preventing them from easily using fluxes to purify the metal at the source, this resulted in a bloom, which is beads of iron interspersed inside useless slag. Then, you have to knead the slag slowly, gradually out of the thing by hand. A trip hammer is indeed a big help here, but it's still a manual process, and the ingot still needs to be reheated many times. Eventually it has a small enough amount of slag to use for tool building, although wrought iron always has some, and has a sort of grain or directionality as a result.

I'd include all the associated lumberjacking and coal and peat mining in the total employment to support this, as well as ore miners, charcoalers, furnace operators and smiths. Global steel production is around 250kg/person today, but obviously that's an apples to oranges comparison.