[HN Gopher] What things cost in Ancient Rome (2007)
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What things cost in Ancient Rome (2007)
Author : leonry
Score : 61 points
Date : 2022-03-12 18:08 UTC (4 hours ago)
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| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| I'm surprised by how expensive chicken was. 8 for beef, 60 for
| chicken?
| sacred_numbers wrote:
| The price for beef is probably per libra (323 grams) and the
| price for chicken is probably for a whole chicken.
| codemac wrote:
| Chickens used to be smaller too though, like the 1950s
| chickens were 3 lbs, now I struggle to even find chickens
| less than 5 lbs at costco.
|
| So a 3 lb chicken, it's still ~1360g, 1360g of beef would be
| ~33.
| stu2b50 wrote:
| Cheap chicken is a very recent thing - like mid 1900s recent.
| Chickens need to feed on grain (unlike cattle), and chickens
| also produce eggs (unlike pigs), which means that they're both
| relatively expensive to raise (before industrial farming made
| grain cheap as well) and have a huge opportunity cost to
| slaughter for meat.
| masklinn wrote:
| Two other items to add to the list:
|
| Modern chickens have ridiculously bulked up, and their
| feeding has been highly optimised, with the fastest growing
| breeds you can turn out a 4lbs broiler in 6 weeks, roman
| chickens would be far less optimised for meat, and as you
| note feed grain would be scarcer, so turning out a chicken
| for meat would also take a lot more time (hence even more
| expenses).
|
| Similarly, dairy cow had been far less optimised, and so had
| dairy "husbandry". Furthermore, cow milk was considered quite
| inferior to goat or sheep (not to mention ancient rome would
| have had pretty high levels of lactose intolerance, which are
| less of an issue with sheep and especially goat milk -- a
| fact sometimes noted by roman writers e.g. Pliny). Thus dairy
| cow husbandry would have little presence in Roman culture,
| instead cattle was mostly work (oxen) and meat. Therefore the
| only balance (and opportunity cost) would be between these
| two, not unlike horse.
| Amezarak wrote:
| Chickens do not need to feed on grain. They are omnivores
| that eat almost anything. You can just feed them table scraps
| and let them forage.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| Table scraps, what? When food is half of income, table
| scraps are much more meager, much less left on the table,
| and there's a whole pecking order of who eats what cuts of
| meat and everything else. Foraging? Yeah if you don't mind
| foxes eating them, which is like the favoritest thing a fox
| can want. They figure out chicken coops built with way more
| resources, and things like wire, in the present day, back
| in Rome it must have been a cakewalk. And I don't blame the
| foxes, nor do I blame native Chilean cats that do the same,
| rather it's just to easy to prey on this flightless bird
| humans feed to eat. The whole concept of animal
| domestication, really.
| stu2b50 wrote:
| Table scraps is not exactly a scalable solution. That's
| fine for a handful of chickens a particular family owns,
| but a) those chickens are not going to be slaughtered until
| they can produce no more eggs and b) they will likely be
| consumed by the family, not sold on the market as it is
| just a handful of animals.
| [deleted]
| spapas82 wrote:
| Can someone explain the purple silk price and penalty?
| master_crab wrote:
| Purple dye in the day was made from hundreds of ground up
| snails. And the color was, as I understood it, an official
| representation of the emperor. So akin to falsely representing
| oneself as the emperor.
|
| I'm sure someone else might have more details on the penalty
| and dye-making process.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| Hundreds? I think way more, the snails seem to have evolved
| to produce very little purple, it seems the Phoenicians
| killed the juicy ones preferentially. I've read the process
| in Medieval times required...don't know like tens of
| kilograms of snail for enough purple to die one item. Like
| bad economics.
| detaro wrote:
| Extremely expensive to make (made from a gland in some species
| of sea snail, so lots of work), which thus turned into a symbol
| of power, which then was reinforced by restrictions on its use.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrian_purple#History
| ogogmad wrote:
| > The cost of baking bread was very high to a poor Roman, so if
| no access to a communal, public oven could be had, the grain
| would be crushed and made into a porridge known as 'puls' that
| was likely similar in taste and texture to modern polenta
|
| According to Wikipedia, "the variety of cereal used [in the dish
| Polenta] is usually yellow maize", which is a New World cereal,
| so not available to the Romans.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Now polenta is made with maize, because it is more tasteful.
|
| However in the ancient Rome the meaning of the words was
| different.
|
| "Polenta" was barley porridge and "puls" was emmer porridge.
| Both were eaten by those who could not afford bread.
|
| "Polenta" was made from "alica", which was a kind of semolina
| made from barley.
| monocasa wrote:
| I mean, the article says that puls was similar to polenta, not
| that it was polenta. Puls was typically made with farro.
| ogogmad wrote:
| Would it have been similar in taste and texture to a dish
| usually made from yellow maize?
| monocasa wrote:
| Yes, crushed and boiled farro is similar to crushed and
| boiled corn.
| kkfx wrote:
| I do not try it crushed, but I do try "modern" farro (due
| to classic seeds selection I can't really say how similar
| to ancient one it is) and it's not much similar to corn,
| grains are bigger, absorb more water, have a bit more
| taste. They are still not beans but definitively more
| tasty even if chewy.
|
| However we also should consider that ancient eating
| habits were FAR different than actual ones, so was life.
| It's very hard to compare "prices" in completely
| different societies... In some part of our history there
| were a big abundance of certain products, in some other a
| big deficiency, in the '700 in western European countries
| most people eat FAR more than now to a point we can't
| probably sustain the rhythm today, in the '300 there was
| a very deep crisis and most people have nearly nothing to
| eat etc. Prices can't be a unique measure like today.
|
| Just imaging a society where most families do have a bit
| of farm animals, for them does it matter their "price"?
| They raise chickens at home, so they have eggs and meat,
| what sense does the price of these "products" makes to
| them? They might just trade them to the few who travel at
| an accordingly high price, but local "poor" do have them
| in their own backyard for "free". Similarly if most
| people outside cities (so most people numerically in
| general) grow wheat in their own backyard how much it
| matter it's price? They trade it for wealthy people
| living in cities or as taxes, to create strategic stocks
| handled by their governments to cope with regular crisis,
| that's form the price, not what people have to pay really
| for it.
| monocasa wrote:
| The crushing them before boiling is what makes them
| similar. It ends up being a starchy paste with little
| uncrushed nodules interspersed.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > Just imaging a society where most families do have a
| bit of farm animals, for them does it matter their
| "price"?
|
| These prices would in practice largely have applied to
| Rome the city (and other cities of the empire), where no-
| one had farm animals. Outside cities there would indeed
| have been more barter (though the Roman Empire was more
| 'globalised' than you'd think; Italy was heavily
| dependent on food imports from Egypt and elsewhere for
| most of the span of the empire), but no-one was producing
| food in Rome itself.
| tuatoru wrote:
| > Just imaging a society where most families do have a
| bit of farm animals
|
| That wasn't ancient Rome, though. Poor people in Rome
| lived in (or around) insulae - apartment buildings.
| gumby wrote:
| > According to Wikipedia, "the variety of cereal used [in the
| dish Polenta] is usually yellow maize", which is a New World
| cereal, so not available to the Romans.
|
| It's quite possible that "polenta" was a generic term for
| "seeds mushed and baked into a savoury cake" that later evolved
| into a more specialized use.
|
| Sort of how the generic term "corn" now refers specifically
| only to maize (and to maize in general, so shedding _all_ of
| its meaning in the process) in American English for some reason
| while its cognate "kernel" does not.
| [deleted]
| Ralfp wrote:
| As a slav I find it amusing how free grain from gov was called by
| "dole" by Romans where we have concept of "dola" which used to be
| your patron spirit quietly influencing your life but in modern
| times its basically something you've got that you've deserved
| (according to higher force or destiny), be it thing, health,
| wealth or life experience.
| dannywarner wrote:
| Many prices of goods are not dissimilar numbers to the numbers on
| Australian or American prices now. Print of beer 4, or a bottle
| of wine 8 to 20. This reminds me of The Economist Big Mac index
| (https://www.economist.com/big-mac-index). The income is of
| course lower, however.
| [deleted]
| foogazi wrote:
| > All data based on Diocletian's "Edict of Maximum Prices" issued
| in 301 AD
|
| > Not satisfied to execute just the seller, Diocletian decreed
| that the buyer was to be executed as well.
| xenomachina wrote:
| Immediately after:
|
| > As a final measure, if a seller refused to sell his goods at
| the stated price, the penalty was death.
|
| So if you have something you don't want to sell, too bad? But
| then there's a simple loophole, too: once you've sold the
| thing, you can buy it back for the same price, and the original
| buyer, now the seller, can't refuse.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Not quite. You are leaving out the condition "if you are in
| the business of selling things, and this is a thing you have
| for sale". If you were a vegetable seller, you would not be
| required to sell your table or your wagon. If you were a cook
| buying vegetables, you would not be required to sell the
| vegetables that you just purchased.
| [deleted]
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